«  —  1 1  — 

^^  a  Journey 


fJiM 


(nU^t/. 


RUSSIA 

AND  ITS  CRISIS 


BY 

PAUL   MILYOUKOV 


Crane  Lectures 
for  igo3 


^ 


CHICAGO 

T'he  University  of  Chicago  Press 

LONDON 

T.  Fisher  Unwiriy  Paternoster  Square 

1906 


COPYEIGHT  1905  By 
The  Univeesity  of  Chicago 


Entered  at  Stationers'  Hall 


Published  August  1905 
Second  Impression  August  1906 


Composed  and  Printed  by 

The  University  of  Chicago  Press 

Chicago,  Illinois,  U.  S.  A. 


^5 


PREFACE 

This  book  is  not  a  political  pamphlet  written  for 
the  occasion,  but  a  result  of  long  years  of  study  devoted 
to  the  explanation  of  the  Russian  present  by  the  Rus- 
sian past.  The  present  crisis  in  Russia  necessarily 
commands  attention,  and  everything  discussed  in  this 
work  converges  to  the  one  aim  of  explaining  this  crisis. 
But  the  conditions  which  have  brought  on  the  crisis  are 
so  deeply  rooted  in  the  past,  and  are  so  closely  inter- 
woven with  every  aspect  of  Russian  life,  whether  of 
religion  or  of  politics,  of  doctrines  or  of  institutions,  of 
social  forms  or  of  the  composition  of  society,  that  an 
explanation  of  the  present  situation,  to  be  at  all  ade- 
quate, must  necessarily  be  a  general  picture  of  Russia 
and  a  general  description  of  the  conditions  under  which 
its  civilization  has  developed.  The  crisis  will  pass,  but 
the  conditions  of  civilization  remain ;  and  my  ambition 
has  been  to  explain,  not  the  momentary  and  transient, 
but  the  permanent  and  lasting,  elements  in  the  political, 
social,  and  religious  life  of  Russia. 

The  contents  of  the  book  are  essentially  the  same 
as  those  of  my  lectures  on  "  Russian  Civilization " 
delivered  during  the  summer  of  1903  at  the  University 
of  Chicago,  on  the  Charles  R.  Crane  Foundation.  The 
first  four  chapters  were  put  into  type  more  than  a 
year  ago;  the  two  following  have  since  then  been 
entirely  recast,  on  a  much  larger  scale;  and  chap,  vii 
is  a  new  addition,  reproducing  the  contents  of  my 
lectures  on  "The   Russian  Crisis"   dehvered  at  the 


vi  PREFACE 

Lowell  Institute  in  Boston,  in  December,  1904,  during 
my  second  visit  to  this  country.  In  the  last  pages  of 
that  chapter  the  events  occurring  in  Russia  during  the 
months  of  December,  1904,  and  January,  1905,  have 
been  considered.  But  it  gives  me  satisfaction  to  state 
that  I  have  had  nothing  to  add  to  my  conclusion,  which 
is  published  just  as  it  was  written  in  1903,  with  the 
addition  only  of  a  few  lines  mentioning  the  subject  of 
chap.  vii.  The  reader  may  find  it  advisable,  before 
perusing  the  book,  to  make  hnnself  acquainted  with 
this  conclusion,  as  it  contains  a  summary,  and  points 
out  the  main  thread,  of  the  argument. 

I  thought  out  and  wrote  this  book  in  English, 
though  I  am  fully  aware  how  imperfect  is  my  command 
of  this  beautiful  language.  Still,  I  think  that  this  was 
a  better  method  than  to  have  had  it  translated  from  a 
Russian  text.  The  most  salient  blunders  have  been 
removed  by  my  English  and  American  friends,  and  I 
avail  myself  of  this  opportunity  to  express  my  appre- 
ciation of  the  kind  assistance  rendered  me  by  Miss 
E.  M.  Hughes,  of  England;  Mr.  Nott  Flint  and  Dr. 
W.  Muss-Arnolt,  of  the  Universitv  of  Chicago;  Pro- 
fessor Leo  Wiener,  of  Harvard  University;  and  the 
reader  of  the  University  Press.  On  the  other  hand,  I 
alone  am  answerable  for  such  imperfections  of  style 
as  may  still  remind  the  reader  that  the  writer  is  a 
foreigner. 

My  system  of  writing  Russian  names  will  be  found 
to  differ  somewhat  from  the  usual  method.  For 
instance,  I  write  Keeyev,  where  an  English  writer  is 
accustomed  to  find  the  spelling  Kiev;  Novoya  Vraimya 
instead  of  Novoe  Vremia;   etc.     In  order  to  explain 


PREFACE  vii 

this  difference,  I  must  say  that  the  only  existing 
"  scientific "  system  of  transliterating  Russian  names 
is  founded  on  the  German  pronunciation,  with  the 
addition  of  some  diacritical  signs.  I  have  thought 
that  an  English  reader  is  justly  entitled  to  his  own 
transliteration,  founded  on  the  English  pronunciation ; 
and  as  I  have  found  it  impracticable  to  employ  any 
diacritical  marks,  it  remained  for  me  to  adopt  a  merely 
phonetic  method.  I  do  not  assert  that  I  have  been 
entirely  consistent  in  this,  and  sometimes  I  have  pre- 
ferred to  retain  the  usual  spelling  of  a  name  which  I 
supposed  to  be  universally  known;  but  I  wish  that 
my  hint  might  be  taken  up  by  somebody  more  experi- 
enced than  I  in  the  orthography  of  foreign  names, 

I  hope  my  personal  attitude  toward  the  questions  I 
have  discussed  in  this  book  will  be  clearly  understood 
by  every  unbiased  reader.  I  am  not  a  "  violent  agita- 
tor," as  one  of  the  Chicago  "yellow  "  papers  was  good 
enough  to  call  me  —  without  ever  having  heard  me,  I 
presume.  But  neither  am  I  what  a  gentleman  con- 
nected with  the  organization  of  the  St.  Louis  Exposi- 
tion expected  me  to  be  when  he  wished  me  to  give 
some  suggestions  as  to  the  arrangement  of  the  Russian 
exhibit  —  suggestions  that  would  please  the  Russian 
government.  I  told  this  gentleman  that  I  was  not  the 
person  to  consult  on  such  a  subject;  and  I  took  the 
liberty  of  adding  that  many  other  Russians  would  like- 
wise be  perplexed  to  answer  his  question,  for  the  reason 
that  there  exist  two  Russias,  one  quite  different  from 
the  other,  and  what  pleases  one  is  quite  sure  to  dis- 
please the  other ;  so  that  trying  to  please  both  at  once 
would  be  a  hopeless  task.     Since  that  time,  however, 


viii  PREFACE 

people  in  America  have  become  better  aware  of  this 
important  distinction ;  and  I  flatter  myself  with  having 
contributed  a  little  to  this  result,  if  I  may  judge  from 
the  interest  taken  in  my  discussions  by  the  very  appre- 
ciative audiences  which  I  had  the  pleasure  of  addressing 
in  Chicago  and  Boston. 

Thus  I  am  tempted  once  more  to  emphasize  this 
distinction.  Were  I  to  label  these  two  Russias,  I 
should  designate  the  one  as  the  Russia  of  Leo  Tolstoy, 
the  great  writer;  and  the  other  as  that  of  Plehve,  the 
late  minister  of  the  interior.  The  former  is  the  Russia 
of  our  "  intellectuals  "  and  of  the  people ;  the  latter  is 
official  Russia.  One  is  the  Russia  of  the  future,  as 
dreamed  of  by  members  of  the  liberal  professions ;  the 
other  is  an  anachronism,  deeply  rooted  in  the  past,  and 
defended  in  the  present  by  an  omnipotent  bureaucracy. 
The  one  spells  liberty;  the  other,  despotism. 

Exception  may  be  taken  to  my  drawing  such  a  line 
of  demarkation  betwen  the  two  Russias,  on  the  ground 
that  it  is  too  contradictory  and  admits  of  no  possible 
third.  I  shall  not  deny  the  element  of  truth  in  this 
objection,  but  I  hope  that  the  soundness  of  my  dis- 
tinction will  become  manifest  after  some  further 
explanation. 

To  be  sure,  Plehve,  whose  name  is  everywhere 
recognized  as  synonymous  with  despotism,  represents 
only  an  aggravated  form  of  what  official  Russia  gen- 
erally is;  and  now  that  he  is  gone,  he  is  even  dis- 
avowed by  the  very  people  whose  cause  he  championed 
and  in  whose  defense  he  lost  his  life.  In  so  far  it 
would  seem  unfair  to  call  the  whole  of  official  Russia 
by  his  name.     Attempts,  however,  have  already  been 


PREFACE  ix 

made  by  some  of  our  political  writers  —  and  .1  deem 
them  not  unsuccessful  —  to  prove  not  only  that  the 
policy  of  Plehve  was  logically  connected  with  the  posi- 
tion of  official  Russia,  but  that,  under  existing  condi- 
tions, it  was  the  only  possible  policy  for  the  autocracy. 
This  policy,  these  authors  argue,  was  nothing  but  the 
logical  outcome  of  a  desire  to  continue  the  defense 
of  a  position  which  was  virtually  lost  and  avowedly 
untenable.  I  admit  that  Plehve  was  only  a  reductio 
ad  ahsurdiim  of  autocracy  —  autocracy  gone  mad; 
but  this  only  because  autocracy  itself  is  reduced  ad 
absurdum  by  the  very  trend  of  life.  If  it  is  to  survive 
at  all,  there  is  really  no  other  means  of  keeping  it  alive 
than  the  policy  of  Plehve.  If  this,  the  "  only  possible," 
policy  has  proved  impossible,  the  fault  is  not  with 
Plehve.  His  failure  is  the  most  instructive  object- 
lesson  ever  held  up  to  autocracy;  the  only  conclusion 
to  be  drawn  from  it  is  that  not  the  man,  but  the  system, 
should  be  condemned.  Unhappily,  the  lesson  does  not 
appear  to  have  been  heeded,  and  as  a  result  we  are  now 
witnessing  an  attempt  at  welding  autocracy  and  liberal- 
ism. The  successors  of  Plehve  will  soon  realize  the 
futility  of  this  endeavor.  But  the  country  at  large  is 
tired  of  object-lessons  and  no  longer  needs  them.  The 
people  ask  for  political  reforms  which  imply  a  nega- 
tion of  autocracy.  So  long  as  autocracy  does  not  sur- 
render, one  may  feel  justified  in  regarding  the  cause 
and  methods  of  Plehve  as  identical  with  those  of  offi- 
cial Russia,  or  with  those  of  autocracy.  And  for  this 
reason  we  emphasize  our  distinction:  autocracy  and 
liberalism  are  incompatible  and  contradictory,  not  only 
according  to  my  definition,  but  in  life  itself. 


X  PREFACE 

My  designation  of  the  other  Russia  as  that  of  Leo 
Tolstoy  hkewise  needs  explanation.  This,  too,  may 
seem,  and  with  more  reason,  an  exaggeration,  a  going 
to  the  opposite  extreme.  In  Tolstoy's  teachings,  the 
idea  of  liberty  is  abstract  and  absolute ;  it  is  worked  out 
and  shaped  into  a  system  of  Christian  anarchism. 
Now,  as  a  matter  of  fact,  the  Russian  "  intellectuals  " 
do  not  care  much  about  the  Christian  element  in  it, 
and  no  anarchism  exists  in  Russia.  We  shall  show 
that  what  in  Russia  is  really  opposed  to  officialdom  and 
autocracy  is  either  liberalism  or  collectivism.  Never- 
theless, Tolstoy's  name  stands  for  Russian  opposition, 
and  will  continue  so  to  stand  as  long  as  it  remains  a 
synonym  for  liberty  in  general  —  liberty  as  the  abso- 
lute negation  of  the  existing  order  of  things. 

I  shall  not  be  expected  to  discuss  Russian  affairs 
from  the  point  of  view  of  Plehveism.  It  is  the  cause  of 
the  other,  the  "greater  Russia,"  that  I  have  made 
mine.  But,  I  am  asked,  is  it  seasonable,  is  it  patriotic, 
to  speak  of  two  Russias  at  a  time  when  they  should 
forget  their  differences  and  unitedly  face  the  common 
enemy?  The  question  may  seem  a  delicate  one.  It 
has  of  late  been  much  debated  in  Russia,  and  has  been 
very  differently  answered.  Many  who  were  friends 
became  enemies  when,  in  pleading  for  this  or  that 
solution,  they  discovered  themselves  to  be  at  variance. 
Permit  me  to  state,  though  not  in  my  own  words,  the 
typical  answer  given  in  Russia.  Recently,  in  a  circle 
of  intimate  friends,  I  overheard  what  I  think  may  be 
called  such  an  answer.  Curiously  enough,  it  was  a 
military  man,  a  young  officer,  who  gave  expression  to 
the  general   feeling.      "Unpatriotic?"   he  exclaimed, 


PREFACE 


XI 


replying  to  the  above  question.  "But  are  we  per- 
mitted to  be  patriotic?  What  is  it  to  be  patriotic  but 
to  love  one's  country,  to  know  it,  and  to  be  free  to  act 
for  its  best  interests  ?  Now,  are  we  permitted  to  know 
all  about  Russia  ?  Are  we  permitted  to  act  for  Russia  ? 
No,  we  are  not.  The  censorship  keeps  us  from  know- 
ing the  truth ;  and  never  was  the  lack  of  real  knowl- 
edge of  current  events  felt  more  sorely  than  now,  dur- 
ing this  wretched  war.  And  what  about  the  possibility 
of  doing  something  for  Russia?  Is  not  every  spon- 
taneous action  doomed  ?  Is  not  every  public  initiative 
cut  short?  Is  there  any  room  left  for  conscious 
patriotism?  Has  not  even  the  humble  attempt  of  the 
self-governing  assemblies  to  unite  in  helping  the  sick 
and  wounded  been  denounced  as  criminal,  and  for- 
bidden by  Plehve?  What  wonder,  then,  if  the  outward 
manifestations  of  our  patriotism  are  not  like  those  of 
other  nations?  How  can  it  be  otherwise,  as  long  as 
real  patriots  are  treated  as  traitors,  while  traitors  are 
proclaimed  patriots?" 

So  spoke  the  officer.  The  sympathies  of  a  foreign 
public  may,  indeed,  have  been  chilled  by  what  was 
considered  a  conspicuous  lack  of  patriotism  in  my 
countrymen;  for  example,  by  a  certain,  seemingly 
utterly  unpatriotic,  letter  of  Tolstoy's  on  the  war. 
But,  in  justice  to  us,  it  must  be  borne  in  mind  that  of 
necessity  our  love  of  country  sometimes  assumes  unex- 
pected forms,  and  that  its  apparent  absence  in  reality 
represents  with  us  the  very  highest  expression  of  true 
patriotic  feeling.  We  may  be  thought  a  queer  sort  of 
people,  but  we  cleave  to  our  own  ideas  of  patriotism ; 
and  we  have  no  hesitancy  in  deciding  which  of  the  two 


PREFACE 


is  the  traitor  and  which  the  patriot,  Plehve  or  Tolstoy, 
if  we  are  obliged  to  choose  between  them.  We  do  not 
call  it  patriotic  to  paralyze  the  living  forces  of  the 
nation  by  a  police  regime,  and  to  name  such  a  destruc- 
tive policy  a  work  of  pacification.  We  do  not  call  it 
patriotic  to  wage  war  for  new  markets  while  we  can- 
not yet  control  our  own,  and  to  destroy  the  fountain- 
head  which  makes  the  domestic  market  prosper  —  the 
purchasing  power  of  the  agricultural  producer.  We 
even  go  so  far  as  not  to  care  a  whit  about  making  other 
people  believe  what  we  do  not  believe  ourselves.  If 
such  "make-believe"  goes  for  "prestige,"  then  we  are 
greatly  averse  to  sacrificing  truth  to  the  preservation 
of  prestige.  Perhaps  this  sort  of  political  recklessness 
is,  at  bottom,  based  on  a  certain  self-confidence  among 
our  people.  We  think,  indeed,  that  the  prestige  of 
Plehve's  Russia  is  once  for  all  ruined,  beyond  the 
possibility  of  restoration.  But  we  think,  too,  that  the 
prestige  of  Tolstoy's  Russia  is  greater  than  ever,  and 
that  we  do  not  lose  anything  —  nay,  that  we  gain 
enormously  —  if  by  the  eclipse  of  the  former  sort  of 
prestige  the  cause  of  reform  is  the  winner. 

Everybody  knows  a  certain  beautiful  fairy-tale  of 
Andersen's.  Some  wise  men  came  to  a  country  and 
promised  to  make  for  its  king  a  state  robe  of  a  gor- 
geous material,  but  such  as  only  wise  men  would  be 
able  to  see.  The  king  was  delighted,  and  the  wise  men 
set  to  work.  The  robe  was  soon  ready,  and  a  solemn 
procession  on  a  feast-day  was  chosen  as  the  occasion 
for  trying  on  the  new  dress.  The  state  councilors 
could  see  nothing,  but  as  they  were  anxious  not  to  be 
taken  for  fools,   they  expressed  admiration   for  the 


PREFACE  xiii 

dress  of  the  king,  and  went  with  him  in  the  procession. 
The  terrified  throng  Hkewise  saw  no  garment;  but 
they  were  afraid  to  speak.  And  so  the  procession  went 
on  in  silence,  until  some  little  unsophisticated  boy,  too 
young  to  be  terrified  or  to  be  afraid  of  making  a  fool 
of  himself,  suddenly  cried  out,  amid  the  general  silence : 
"  But  the  king  is  naked ! "  The  crowd  howled  and 
groaned ;  the  cowardice  and  rascality  of  the  councilors 
became  manifest  to  everybody;  and  the  king  was 
ashamed  and  furious. 

Thus  it  is  with  Russia.  Serious  men  for  years  and 
years  have  worn  a  state  robe  whose  beauty  was  clear 
only  to  a  few  conjuring  wiseacres;  and  millions  of 
men,  groaning  under  the  burden  of  its  cost,  have 
mournfully  kept  silence  watching  the  solemn  proces- 
sion, until  an  untoward  event  has  come,  like  the 
child  in  Andersen's  tale,  to  tell  the  whole  world  that 
the  wisdom  is  counterfeit  and  the  wearers  of  the  robe 
are  ''naked."    This  event  is  the  war. 

Well,  the  only  advice  we  can  give  to  these  people 
is:  Put  on  new  clothes,  and  do  it  as  soon  as  possible! 


Paul  Milyoukov. 


Chicago, 
Abraham  Lincoln's  birthday,  1905. 


TABLE   OF   CONTENTS 


Chapter         I.    Introductory.       Russia     and     the     United 
States :     A   Comparison 

Chapter  II.  The  NationaHstic   Idea 

Chapter  III.  The  Religious    Tradition 

Chapter  IV.  The  Political   Tradition 

Chapter  V.  The  Liberal   Idea 

Chapter  VI.  The  Socialistic    Idea 

Chapter  VII.  The  Crisis  and  the  Urgency  of  Reform 

Chapter  VIII.  Conclusion 

Index  


MAPS 


PAGE 

3 

30 

65 

131 

221 

334 
433 
546 
565 


Process  of  Settlement  of  European  Russia  . 
Making  of  the  Russian  State       .         .         .         . 
Local  Types  of  Russian  Culture  .         .         .         . 
Reign  of  the  "  Small  State  of  Siege  "  . 
Changes  in  Peasant  Prosperity  in  the  Period  1861- 

1900 

Present  State  of  Peasant  Prosperity   . 


opposite  6 

opposite  S2 

opposite  142 

opposite  188 

opposite  434 

opposite  436 


CHAPTER   I 

INTRODUCTORY 
RUSSIA  AND  THE  UNITED  STATES  :    A  COMPARISON 

In  accepting  the  kind  invitation  of  the  University 
of  Chicago  asking  me  to  speak  on  Russian  civiHzation, 
I  was  perfectly  aware  that  the  task  was  not  an  easy 
one.  It  is  difficult,  especially  for  a  stranger,  to  attempt 
to  present  to  you,  in  the  short  time  allowed,  the  very 
complex  and  peculiar  process  of  the  historical  develop- 
ment of  a  nation;  and  when  that  nation  is  one  whose 
tastes,  feelings,  and  habits  seem  to  be  so  different 
from  your  own,  the  difficulty  is  enhanced.  Moreover, 
it  will  not  be  possible  for  me  to  produce  adequate 
evidence  in  support  of  all  I  have  to  say;  and  yet  I 
cannot  assume  that  the  data  are  known  to  you.  What 
I  have  to  do,  under  these  circumstances,  is  to  try  a 
shorter  way  than  that  of  collecting  material  evidence 
and  plunging  you  into  the  arid  details  of  Russian  his- 
tory. I  shall  start  with  those  conditions  in  Russia 
which  are  more  generally  known  to  you;  and  for 
these  conditions  I  shall  try  to  find  a  historical  explana- 
tion. Great  as  the  difference  is  between  your  country 
and  my  own,  there  may  be  found  many  points  of 
contact  and  similarity  in  the  general  lines  of  social 
development  and  in  the  general  aims  which  a  civilized 
nation  always  strives  to  attain.  But  similar  as  the 
aims  and  the  general  drift  of  civilization  may  be,  the 
conditions  under  which  progress  is  achieved  in  various 
countries  are  widely  different.     It  will  be  the  chief 

3 


4  RUSSIA  AND  ITS  CRISIS 

object  of  our  study  to  point  out  what  these  conditions 
have  been  in  Russia. 

As  you  know,  Russia  is  just  now  struggHng  for 
political  and  religious  freedom.  You  may  have  asked 
yourselves  whether  this  necessary  condition  of  every 
higher  civilizaton  is  likely  to  be  fulfilled  in  Russia. 
Is  the  state  of  agitation  in  which  we  now  find  Russia 
an  outward  sign  of  her  moving  forward  to  a  higher 
plane  of  existence?  Or  is  this  not  rather  a  momentary 
outburst  of  a  slavish  population,  suddenly  thrown  from 
fear  to  despair  by  hard  times,  and  likely  to  relapse 
soon  into  its  former  state  of  abject  servility  and 
prostration?  And  if,  as  in  the  previous  supposition, 
these  troubles  represent  a  necessary  stage  of  Russian 
social  and  political  evolution,  why  has  this  stage  made 
its  appearance  so  comparatively  late?  What  have  been 
the  checks  and  obstacles  which  Russia  has  met  on  its 
path?  What  chances  are  there  for  the  final  success 
of  the  struggle  for  civilization? 

The  answer  I  shall  give  to  these  questions  will  not 
be  discouraging,  so  far  as  the  future  of  Russia  is 
concerned.  Though  in  its  past  and  present  only  too 
many  diseases  will  be  found  to  exist,  I  am  sure  that 
one  would  find  none  of  these  diseases  incurable.  And 
such  as  one  observed  would  be  seen  to  be  nothing 
but  ailments  of  growth.  For  growth  has  always  been 
present  in  Russian  history,  however  adverse  may  have 
been  at  times  the  conditions  for  a  normal  development 
of  the  Russian  nation 

Rapid    growth    is    one    of    the    most    important 
.i^StHJ.^?~-i??,..?,95}0^o^  between  your  country  and  mine. 
.RiASSja^nd^Jhe  Uji^^^^ 


RUSSIA  AND  THE  UNITED  STATES  5 

gressing;  neither  has  as  yet  attained  the  highest  point 
.,of_its  possible  develqpmentj    both  are  very  far  from 
any  signs  of  decay. 

The  similarity  fhus  pointed  out  is  far  from  being 
only  an  outward  one.  We  may  trace  it  deeper  into 
the  inward  structure  of  the  history  of  both  nations. 
Jiapid  growth  is  the  immediate  result  of  recent  settle- 
ment. If  we  study  the  conditions  of  settlement,  both 
in  Russia  and  in  America,  we  shall  soon  discover  how 
close  the  similarity  is  between  the  countries.  At  the 
same  time  we  shall  be  enabled  to  cast  a  glance  at 
such  differences  as  have  made  one  country  achieve  an 
amazing  progress,  while  the  other  has  been  held  back 
in  its  development  for  whole  centuries.  Let  us  then 
take  the  process  of  settlement  in  Russia  and  in  America 
as  the  subject  of  our  introductory  study.  And  this 
study,  though  it  will  not  furnish  adequate  answers  to 
the  questions  formulated,  will  yet  indicate  to  us  the 
direction  in  which  these  answers  should  be  sought. 

Both  Russia  and  the  United  States  have  been  col- 
onized, not  at  a  prehistoric  stage  of  their  existence, 
but  in  recent  historic  times.  Hence  the  settlement 
and  the  exploitation  of  the  natural  resources  of  the 
country  form  the  very  warp  of  their  historical  texture. 
Most  of  the  important  features  of  their  economical, 
social,  and  political  development  must  be  referred  to 
this  process  of  colonization. 

For  our  present  purposes,  the  whole  process  of 
Russian  settlement  may  be  divided  into  two  consecu- 
tive stages :  from  the  earliest  times  till  the  middle  of 
the  sixteenth  century,  and  from  that  time  down  to  the 
present  day.     It  is  in  its  second  stage  that  the  process 


6  RUSSIA  AND  ITS  CRISIS 

of  settlement  may  be  compared  with  that  of  America. 

Only  the  northern  half  of  Russia  was  populated 
before  the  sixteenth  century.  It  is  poorly  endowed 
by  nature  and  scantily  settled,  and  therefore  may  be 
compared  with  Canada.^  The  whole  of  the  better  and 
richer  half  of  Russia — southward  from  the  Oka  River 
— has  been  colonized  only  since  the  middle  of  the  six- 
teenth century.  Before  that  time  this  ''  granary  of 
Europe"  presented  the  aspect  of  a  limitless  prairie, 
laid  waste  for  centuries  by  the  continual  raids  of  Turk- 
ish and  Tartar  tribes.  Central  Asia  sent  forth,  like 
a  series  of  tidal  waves,  these  tribes  of  nomads,  almost 
without  interruption,  during  a  long  period  of  ten 
centuries — from  the  fourth  to  the  thirteenth.  No  won- 
der that  they  completely  swept  away  the  aborigines 
of  the  prairie,  who  had  supplied  Athens  with  grain 
in  the  olden  days. 

As  late  as  the  sixteenth  century,  life  in  the  prairie 
was  again  made,  if  not  entirely  safe,  at  least  possible 
for  the  settler.  The  Muscovite  government  provided 
the  settlers  with  some  military  defense,  though  of  a 
very  inefficient  nature,  and  they  rushed  in  a  flood  to 
the  virgin  prairie  land.^  They  sought  new  places 
where  the   resources   of   nature   were  to   be   had   in 

*One  may  see  on  the  map  blank  places  in  northern  Russia, 
which  correspond  to  regions  entirely  unsettled  even  at  the  present 
time. 

*The  plan  of  this  colonization  is  represented  on  the  map  by  four 
consecutive  strips  which  begin  at  the  line  of  the  military  defense 
constructed  by  the  government  of  Moscow  in  the  middle  of  the  six- 
teenth century,  and  proceed  by  centuries.  The  yellow  strip  corre- 
sponds to  the  settlement  from  the  middle  of  the  sixteenth  century 
to  the  middle  of  the  seventeenth  century ;  the  green,  to  that  from 
the    middle    of    the    seventeenth    to    the    middle    of   the    eighteenth 


r 


T 7 


CD   — 


OTHER  THAN  RUSSIAN. 


Nogais  (Tartar). 
:e  parts  of  the  map  (how  u 


RUSSIA  AND  THE  UNITED  STATES  7 

abundance;  and  at  the  same  time  hoped  to  free  them- 
selves from  the  Muscovite  rule  —  a  rule  they  were  feel- 
ing heavily  just  then  on  account  of  the  increased 
taxes  and  the  severer  military  service,  made  necessary 
for  the  defense  of  the  southern  frontier.^ 

The  old  stock  of  the  trans-Okan  population  thus 
served  to  settle  the  prairie  land,  as  the  British  and 
the  New  Englanders  served  to  colonize  the  territories 
of  North  America.  Of  course,  the  general  drift  of 
immigration  was  differently  directed.  In  Russia  the 
newcomers,  instead  of  being  bound  for  the  west,  w'ent 
to  the  south  and  the  southeast,  following  the  courses 
of  the  Russian  rivers.  The  Don  was  their  Mississippi, 
the  Urals  their  Rocky  Mountains.  Siberia,  the  last 
section  to  be  colonized,  may  be  compared  with  Oregon 
and  California ;  and  it  exhibits  breaks  in  the  continuity 
of  settlement  similar  to  those  in  Nevada  or  Utah. 

The  Russian  colonists  met  with  the  same  kind 
of  difficulties  in  their  settlement  as  the  Americans. 
Woods  had  to  be  cleared ;  the  virgin  prairie  land  had 
to  be  broken;  the  necessities  of  life  had  to  be  provided. 
Thus  the  immigrants  of  both  countries  were  for  cen- 
turies completely  absorbed  in  the  process  of  utilizing 
the  natural  resources  of  the  newly  occupied  land, 
taking  possession  of  the  riches  of  its  rivers,  of  its 
woods,  and  of  its  luxuriant  vegetation,  profiting  by 
the  almost  inexhaustible  fertility  of  the  soil,  and  at 

century ;  the  orange,  to  the  settlement  of  the  second  half  of  the 
eighteenth  century  ;  the  purple,  to  the  settlement  of  the  nineteenth 
century.  The  black  shows  places  which  are  (and  for  many  centuries 
have  been)   occupied  by  the  aborigines. 

■^  See  chap,  vi,  p.  357,  where  social  reasons  for  this  shifting  of  the 
population  from  the  ancient  center  are  shown. 


8  RUSSIA  AND  ITS  CRISIS 

last — in  Russia  in  recent  times — by  the  mineral  wealth. 
During  this  slow  and  continuous  process  of  hard 
manual  labor,  social  life  in  Russia  assumed  a  shape 
which  is  not  dissimilar  to  that  in  the  United  States. 
The  colonists,  tilling  their  own  holdings  with  their 
own  hands,  formed  a  population  that  was  to  a  high 
degree  simple,  agricultural,  and  democratic.  To  be 
sure,  this  large  social  foundation  of  rural  democracy 
was  to  a  great  extent  covered  and  disguised  by  the 
growth  of  the  landed  aristocracy  in  Russia  and  by 
the  development  of  the  commercial  classes  in  the 
United  States.  But  neither  of  these  classes  was 
powerful  enough  to  eclipse  the  democratic  spirit  and 
the  agricultural  character  of  both  nations.  Moreover, 
in  Russia  the  upper  layer  of  the  landed  aristocracy 
was  finally  destroyed,  as  we  shall  see  later  (chap.  v). 
Of  course,  a  certain  sense  of  class  dignity,  a  kind  of 
fastidiousness,  such  as  causes  the  continental  nobility 
of  Europe  to  keep  clear  of  every  contact  with  the 
lower  strata  of  society,  is  not  wholly  absent  in  the 
upper  layers  of  Russian  society.  But  in  Russia  as 
well  as  in  your  country  this  feeling  is  a  comparatively 
recent  foreign  importation.  There,  as  well  as  here, 
it  serves  as  a  kind  of  substitute  for  historical  and 
legal  distinctions  between  dififerent  social  stations. 
Lacking  such  distinctions,  the  boundary  lines  between 
the  different  classes  are  very  indefinite,  and  the  inter- 
course between  the  lower  and  the  upper  classes  is 
actually  free.  As  a  matter  of  fact,  both  are  perpetu- 
ally interchanging  their  elements.  That  is  why  social 
conventionalities  and  the  outward  marks  of  refined 


RUSSIA  AND  THE  UNITED  STATES  9 

culture  are  so  eagerly  preserved  from  final  destruc- 
tion in  one  country,  and  so  eagerly  built  anew  in  the 
other.  Here  as  well  as  there,  this  is  the  only  means 
of  defense  against  what  is  called  by  sociologists  "social 
capillarify/' 

Thus — we  say  it  again — the  social  structure,  both 
in  Russia  and  in  the  United  States,  is  very  democratic. 

But  here  the  comparison  ends.  The  settlers  who 
went  from  England  to  the  American  shore,  or  from 
New  England  to  the  American  West,  were  entirely 
different  from  those  who  drifted  from  the  old  Mus- 
covite center  to  the  southern  "black  soil"  prairies 
of  Russia;  and  different  also  were  the  things  they 
achieved.  Ours  were  not  the  free  men  of  Massachu- 
setts, bringing  with  them  into  their  new  settlements 
their  old  habits  of  religious  freedom  and  moral  self- 
assertion,  planting  on  new  soil  their  ancient  autonomic 
organization  of  townships,  and  so  preparing  them- 
selves for  the  requirements  of  democratic  rule.  Such 
among  the  Russian  settlers  as  wanted  freedom  and 
activity  dashed  through  uninhabited  land  and  prairies 
to  the  remotest  borders  of  the  country,  where  the  state 
officials  were  quite  unable  to  follow  them.  On  the 
southern  confines  of  the  Muscovite  Tsardom  they  lived 
the  lives  of  outlaws.  They  worked  out  a  military 
organization  of  their  own — something  between  a 
pirate  crew  and  a  horde  of  nomads,  banded  together 
for  economic  purposes.  The  bulk  of  them  lived  by 
fishing  and  hunting.  And  they  sent  forth  their  restless 
youths  to  raid  still  farther  southward,  eastward,  or 
westward,  along  the  shores  of  the  Caspian  or  the 
Black  Sea,  into  territories  inhabited  by  the  "infidels," 


10  RUSSIA  AND  ITS  CRISIS 

the  "Bussurmans"  (Mussulmans),  whom  they  thought 
it  no  sin  to  rob  and  plunder. 

The  colonists  of  a  more  peaceful  disposition  did 
not  go  so  far.  They  r«mained  in  the  interior  of  the 
country,  as  close  as  possible  to  the  strips  of  land  that 
had  been  settled  last,  and  the  government  followed 
at  their  heels.  The  state  officials  pressed  them  into 
compulsory  organizations,  instead  of  allowing  them 
to  found  townships  and  to  initiate  a  self-government 
at  their  will.  Men  sent  out  by  the  central  authorities 
directed  every  step  of  the  colonization.  They  deter- 
mined the  points  at  which  the  colonists  were  to  meet 
to  do  frontier  service  and  defend  the  settlement ;  they 
ordered  these  points  to  be  inclosed  by  town  walls — and 
thus  about  one-half  the  Russian  cities  were  built;  at 
the  same  time  they  distributed  the  parcels  of  land 
among  the  settlers  in  the  districts.  After  this  the 
tilling  of  land  became  obligatory  for  the  new  settlers, 
in  order  that  the  central  government  should  not  be 
obliged  to  send  grain  for  their  maintenance  from  the 
earlier  settlements.  Thus  the  inhabitants  were  com- 
pelled to  leave  the  easier  pursuits  of  hunting  and  fish- 
ing for  that  of  agriculture,  or  to  combine  them.  Of 
course  they  reluctantly  complied  with  the  orders  of 
the  Tsar;  but  so  far  as  possible  they  shirked  their 
agricultural  work.  They  tilled  their  fertile  soil  super- 
ficially and  carelessly,  and  were  fully  satisfied  with  their 
scanty  returns. 

Thus,  the  consequences  of  a  like  process  of  settle- 
ment in  Russia  proved  to  be  widely  different  from 
those  in  the  United  States.  Of  course,  the  conditions 
of  environment  may  partly  account  for  the  difference. 


RUSSIA  AND  THE  UNITED  STATES  ii 

There  was  one  particular  condition  at  work  in  Russia 
which  fettered  the  free  play  of  private  action  and 
individual  enterprise.  This  was  the  danger  from  with- 
out, which  made  the  buildin^j  of  a  powerful  central 
state  organization  absolutely  necessary.  The  raids  of 
Tartars  from  the  shores  of  the  Black  Sea,  with  Turkey 
at  their  back,  were  infinitely  more  dangerous  for  Rus- 
sia than  the  "Indian  wars"  have  been  here.  The 
nomad  organization  of  the  Tartar  invaders  admitted 
of  incomparably  more  concentration  of  power  than 
the  tribal  states  of  the  Indians  could  possibly  muster. 
Hence,  the  Tartar  incursions  were  much  better  organ- 
ized and  conducted ;  and  a  more  centralized  military 
defense  had  to  be  brought  into  action  in  order  to  hold 
them  in  check.  That  is  why  the  defenders  had  to  be 
put  under  the  stricter  rule  of  a  central  government. 
Had  American  settlers  been  compelled  to  colonize 
Russian  prairies  under  these  conditions,  they  too 
would  probably,  to  a  certain  degree,  have  been  checked 
in  their  unlimited  individual  development. 

But  Russian  settlers  were  not  Americans.  And 
this  is  the  second  reason  for  the  difference  in  the 
results  of  their  settlement.  The  Americans  came  to 
their  new  lands  with  a  ready  stock  of  energy,  accumu- 
lated at  a  previous  period  of  their  history.  This  con- 
dition was  entirely  lacking  in  Russia.  Therefore  it  is 
that  quite  an  opposite  use  was  made  by  the  Russian 
and  by  the  American  settlers  of  supplies  of  nature 
equally  abundant.  The  Russian  colonists,  we  saw, 
were  glad  to  get  what  nature  gave  them,  with  little 
labor  and  with  still  less  capital.  Man's  work,  far 
from   adding   anything   new    to    the    ready    store   of 


12  RUSSIA  AND  ITS  CRISIS 

nature's    resources,    resulted    in    squandering    these 
resources,  and  thus  impoverished  the  country,  instead 
of   enriching   it.      The   woods   were   cut   away,    and 
thereby  the  soil  exposed  to  droughts  and  to  the  free 
action  of  the  winds,  and  this,  too,  in  the  most  fertile 
part  of  Russia.    Large  quantities  of  arable  land  were 
carelessly  left  to  be  swept  away  by  the  spring  torrents, 
and  so  were  turned  into  sandy  ravines.     At  the  same 
time  the  demand  for  land  largely  increased,  because 
of  the  growth  of  the  population,   and   whole  tracts 
of  land  could  no  longer  be  left  to  lie  fallow  for  years, 
or  even  for  one  year,  as  had  necessarily  been  done 
under  the  former  systems  of  tillage  without  manure. 
And  yet  no  better  system  was  ready  at  hand  to  sup- 
plant them.    The  wealth  of  nature  having  been  spent, 
Russia  has  stopped  at  a  point  which  cannot  be  passed 
unless  more  artificial  ways  and  means  of  cultivation 
are  resorted  to,  and  unless  greater  personal  energy 
and  initiative  are  applied.     And  in  these  qualities  we 
are  deficient. 

We  can  now  sum  up  the  difference  between  the 
results  of  the  Russian  and  of  the  American  settlement. 
In  America  the  exploitation  of  the  untouched  stores 
of  the  natural  resources  resulted  in  a  greater  exercise 
of  the  settlers'  individual  activity.  In  Russia  the  same 
abundance  of  supplies  served  only  as  a  temporary  sub- 
stitute for  energy  and  individual  effort.  Thus  the 
riches  of  nature  served  there  only  to  perpetuate  the 
inactive  and  socially  undeveloped  type  of  man  during 
a  long  period  of  four  centuries.  Therefore,  the  type 
of  the  settlers,  and  not  the  outward  conditions  of  the 


RUSSIA  AND  THE  UNITED  STATES  13 

settlement,  appears  to  be  mainly  responsible  for  the 
difference  in  the  results  of  colonization  in  Russia  and 
in  America.  And  this  brings  us  to  a  more  detailed 
consideration  of  the  question  as  to  what  the  Russian 
national  type  really  was. 

Everybody  knows  what  was  the  social  type  of  the 
men  who  came  from  east  of  the  Alleghanies  to  the 
West.  They  had  at  their  back  centuries  of  social 
struggle  and  co-operation.  Their  mental  habits  had 
long  been  formed;  their  moral  character  had  been 
hammered  into  a  definite  shape  by  their  past;  their 
traditions,  political  and  religious,  had  had  time  to 
crystallize.  Thus  they  w^ere  enabled  to  set  out  along 
new  paths  of  development  which  were  to  be  unique 
in  the  world. 

What  now  was  the  social  type  of  the  people  who 
came  from  north  of  the  Oka  River?  The  question 
needs  consideration,  because  there  is  no  answer  to 
which  everybody  w^ould  agree.  To  state  at  once  my 
own  conclusion  on  this  subject,  I  should  point  to  a 
certain  amorphousness,  a  certain  plasticity  in  Russian 
manners  and  character,  as  a  chief  feature  in  the  Rus- 
sian national  type.  This  I  consider  to  be  its  only 
inheritance  from  the  past,  negative  though  it  be.  I 
am  quite  sure  that  nearly  everything,  either  good  or 
bad,  that  has  ever  been  told  about  the  Russian  national 
character  by  both  foreign  and  native  observers  can  be 
referred  to  this  feature. 

Let  us  take  as  an  illustration  the  description  of 
Russian  character  by  one  of  the  most  recent  and  most 
exhaustive  of  English  observers,  who  fairly  represents 
the  whole  class.    I  mean  Mr.  Lanin  (pseudonym),  the 


14  RUSSIA  AND  ITS  CRISIS 

author  of  the  book  on  Russian  Characteristics.  As  is 
the  rule  with  the  sketches  drawn  by  strangers,  the 
picture  Mr.  Lanin  gives  of  us  is  indeed  not  a  flattering 
one.  Still,  except  for  the  fact  that  Mr.  Lanin's 
authorities  are  not  always  either  trustworthy  or  well 
chosen,  and  that  the  instances  he  quotes  are  sometimes 
exceptional  rather  than  characteristic,"*  the  general 
impression  he  gives  is,  we  must  admit,  not  far  from 
true.  The  average  Russian,  Mr.  Lanin  argues,  is 
likely  to  be  very  unsteady  in  his  purposes,  conse- 
quently unreliable  in  keeping  his  word,  apt  to  cher- 
ish rather  lax  views  of  the  right  of  prtpci^y,  iC* 
very  lenient  in  matters  of  sexual  morality.  He  does 
not  appreciate  the  value  of  time.  He  is  much  given 
to  lying  and  cheating,  and  this  not  only  for  his  own 
profit,  but  sometimes  simply  for  the  sake  of  politeness. 
Of  course,  polite  manners  are  everywhere  based  on 
"conventional  lies."  But  in  Russia  lying  is  not  only 
conventional;  it  is  sometimes  a  matter  of  sincerity 
and  conviction.  They  lie  there,  Mr.  Lanin  observes, 
in  a  genuine  way,  in  a  peculiarly  "childlike  and  easy 
manner,"  unconscious  of  doing  ill  and,  accordingly, 
free  from  any  hypocrisy.  Indeed,  Mr.  Lanin  observes 
(p.  173)  that,  in  general,  "curious  combinations  of 
religion  and  rascality,  friendship  and  treachery,  with- 
out the  usual  cement  of  hypocrisy,"  form  one  of  the 

*Mr.  Lanin  compiles  very  much  of  his  evidence  from  newspapers, 
relating  the  occurrences  of  everyday  life  with  more  or  less  imagina- 
tive amplifications.  Now,  I  think  Mr.  Bryce  was  perfectly  right 
when  he  observed  about  the  American  press — and  such  also  was  my 
own  impression  in  the  Balkan  states — that  the  newspapers  tend 
always  to  exaggerate  a  nation's  weaknesses  in  order  to  make  fun 
of  them. 


RUSSIA  AND  THE  UNITED  STATES  15 

most  "conspicuous  features  of  the  Russian  character." 
The  observation  is  a  fine  one  and  has  a  meaning 
which  it  is  necessary,  for  our  present  purpose,  to 
make  clear.  The  cement  of  hypocrisy  is  not  in  the 
Russian  mind,  for  the  same  reason  that  it  is  absent 
from  the  mind  of  a  child.  Hypocrisy  becomes  neces- 
sary only  when  a  certain  standard  of  social  conduct 
becomes  obligatory,  or  when  it  is  enforced  upon  indi- 
vidual members  of  society  by  a  fear  of  responsibility 
for  transgressions.  Then  only  is  it  that  vice  is  to 
take  the  shape  of  virtue  and  to  pay  her  a  tribute 
i.i;y^iichjiscilled  hypocrisy.  Now  this  tribute  is  not  paid 
in  Russia ;  hypocrisy  is  not  much  practiced. 

We  shall  soon  see  what  inference  may  be  drawn 
from  this  observation.  Let  us  now  complete  Mr. 
Lanin's  description  by  speaking  of  some  positive  traits 
of  Russian  character,  observed  by  the  same  author. 
The  link  between  the  positive  and  the  negative  charac- 
ter he  finds  to  be  very  close.  "The  Russian  is  so 
hearty,"  he  says,  "so  good  humored,  so  intensely 
human,  that  dishonesty  seems  in  his  hands  only  dis- 
torted virtue."  I  cannot  abstain  from  quoting  here  a 
charming  little  story  which  Mr.  Lanin  tells  us  in  sup- 
port of  his  assertion. 

At  Saratoff  on  the  Volga  the  steamer  "Alexander  II."  was 
about  to  start.  It  was  crowded  with  passengers.  All  the  first- 
and  second-class  tickets  were  .sold,  and  in  the  third  class  there 
was  no  room  for  an  apple  to  fall ;  the  passengers,  so  to  say,  sat 
upon  each  other.  After  the  first  whistle,  the  assistant  captain, 
hurrying  through  the  crowds  of  third-class  passengers,  was  sud- 
denly stopped  by  a  peasant,  who  had  just  lodged  a  complaint  that 
his  money  was  stolen. 


i6  RUSSIA  AND  ITS  CRISIS 

"Your  honor,  the  money  has  been  found,"  he  said. 

"Found  where?" 

"Sewed  up  in  that  soldier's  mantle.  I  went  over  there  to 
search  for  it,  and  sure  there  were  forty-one  roubles  and  a  twenty- 
kopeck  piece,"  said  the  peasant,  brandishing  a  chamois  leather 
purse  as  if  it  were  a  war  trophy. 

"Where  is  that  soldier?" 

"There  he  is,  asleep." 

"Well,  he  must  be  handed  over  to  the  police." 

"Handed  over  to  the  police?  Why  to  the  police?  Christ  be 
with  him !  Don't  touch  him ;  let  him  sleep  on,"  he  repeated, 
naively,  good-naturedly  adding :  "Sure,  the  money  is  found ;  it's 
all  there.     What  more  do  we  want?" 

And  so  the  matter  ended. 

Thus  an  intimate  connection  between  what  are  con- 
sidered to  be  Russian  vices  and  Russian  virtues  is 
duly  testified  to  by  a  foreign  observer,  subject  to  no 
suspicion  of  partiaHty.  This  close  connection  leads  us 
to  suppose  that  Russian  virtues  and  Russian  vices 
may  be  traced  to  a  common  origin.  But  before  we 
proceed  to  trace  this  origin  any  further,  we  have  yet 
to  consider  whether  the  Russian  view  of  national 
character  agrees  with  that  of  foreign  observers.  Of 
course,  we  must  expect  to  find  Russian  writers  exalt- 
ing Russian  virtues  and  omitting  to  mention  or  even 
to  take  notice  of  Russian  faults.  We  may  take  as  an 
extreme  example  of  such  Russian  authors  as  are  given 
most  to  exaggerated  ideas  concerning  national  virtues 
the  renowned  novelist  Dostoyevsky.  Russian  virtues 
are,  according  to  Dostoyevsky,  simply  Christian  vir- 
tues. The  Russian  is  full  of  love,  humility,  meekness 
toward  his  neighbors;  he  is  given  to  renunciation 
and  self-sacrifice.  In  short,  the  Russian  is  "all-human," 
a  phrase  by  which  Dostoyevsky  wishes  to  make  us 


RUSSIA  AND  THE  UNITED  STATES  17 

understand  that  the  Russian  mind  is  universally  sym- 
pathetic and  universally  receptive ;  and  that  this  "uni- 
versal receptiveness"  is  the  very  essence  of  the  Russian 
national  character.     To  quote  his  own  words : 

You  will  agree  with  us  that  in  the  Russian  character  there 
is  one  trait  widely  different  from  anything  in  the  European, 
namely,  that  it  is  in  a  high  degree  endowed  with  a  capacity  for 
synthesis— with  the  talent  for  a  universal  reconciliation,  with 
an  all-humanness.^  There  is  nothing  in  it  like  the  European 
angularity  —  no  impermeability,  no  stiffness.  It  easily  accom- 
modates itself  to  everybody  and  adapts  itself  to  every  kind  of 
life.  It  sympathizes  with  everything  that  is  human,  without  any 
distinction  of  nationality,  blood,  or  soil.  It  finds  out  and 
immediately  admits  to  be  reasonable  whatever  may  contain  but 
a  grain  of  all-human  interest.  It  is  possessed  by  a  sort  of  instinct 
of  all-humanness.  This  national  character  by  instinct  discovers 
features  of  humanity  even  in  the  most  exclusive  peculiarities  of 
other  nations.  It  at  once  conciliates  and  harmonizes  them  by 
dint  of  its  own  generalization,  finds  a  place  for  them  in  its  own 
scheme  of  reasoning,  and  thus  often  discovers  a  point  of  con- 
vergence and  of  reconciliation  between  the  entirely  opposed  and 
conflicting  ideas  of  any  two  different  European  nations,  while 
these  nations  of  themselves  would  find  no  methods  of  reconciling 
their  ideas  and  thus,  may  be,  would  never  be  able  to  harmonize 
them.  At  the  same  time  you  may  observe  in  a  Russian  an 
unlimited  capability  for  the  soundest  self-criticism,  soberest  judg- 
ment of  himself,  a  complete  absence  of  self-assertion,  which  is 
sometimes  prejudicial  to  the  liberty  of  action. 

These  last  words  of  Dostoyevsky  are  particularly 
interesting  to  us.  For  he  admits  that  the  absence  of 
any  positive  motive  for  action — an  absence  originating 
in  the  lack  of  any  definite  individuality — may  go  so  far 
in  the  Russian  character  as  to  preclude  the  possibility 
of  any  action  altogether.     The   observation   is   very 

"  Dostoyevsky's  term  is  here  translated  literally,  for  even  in  the 
Russian  it  is  an  artificial   one. 


i8  RUSSIA  AND  ITS  CRISIS 

sound,  indeed,  and  its  accuracy  is  above  all  suspicion. 
The  type  is  well  known  in  Russian  fiction.  But  with 
this  observation  by  Dostoyevsky  we  unexpectedly  come 
back  to  the  same  conclusion  that  was  postulated  by  us 
beforehand.  We  have  now  to  accept  as  the  chief  fea- 
ture of  the  Russian  character  a  complete  absence  of 
anything  limiting,  anything  "stiff"  and  "angular"  in 
the  Russian  mind.  But  is  not  the  "all-humanness"  of 
Dostoyevsky — while  it  is  endowed  with  such  traits — 
just  the  same  thing  as  the  "amorphousness"  and  "plas- 
ticity" of  our  own  definition  given  by  us  at  the  very 
beginning  of  this  reasoning?  It  is  so,  indeed.  The 
plasticity  and  indefiniteness  of  the  Russian  type,  and, 
as  a  necessary  consequence,  its  wonderful  adaptability 
to  new  conditions  and  surroundings;  such  are  the 
qualities  that  make  the  Russian  mind  so  "universally 
receptive,"  and  accordingly  "all-human."  It  does  not 
impress  itself  on  things,  but  is  impressed  by  their 
"angularity"  and  "stiffness;"  and  thus  it  is  rather 
passive  than  active,  rather  receptive  than  creative. 

Thus  the  bad  and  the  good  traits  of  the  Russian 
type  really  take  their  rise  in  this  one  fundamental 
quality — its  flexibility,  its  accessibility  to  every  new 
impression.  A  backbone  is  missing  both  in  Russian 
virtues  and  Russian  vices.  We  have  already  quoted 
Mr.  Lanin's  observation  that  in  the  Russian  character 
the  "cement  of  hyprocrisy"  is  lacking;  by  which  we 
meant  that  in  Russia  hypocrisy  has  no  medium  of 
social  conventionalities  to  nestle  in.  Now  we  may 
proceed  to  a  further  generalization.  It  is  not  only 
the  social  conventionalities  that  are  undeveloped,  but 
the  "social  mind"  in  general.     The  psychological  web 


RUSSIA  AND  THE  UNITED  STATES  19 

of  social  forms,  symbols,  principles,  and  habits — in 
short,  of  everything  shaped  by  social  intercourse — is 
very  thin  and  flimsy.  A  body  of  social  tradition 
generally  determines  social  conduct  and  works  out 
formulas  which  act  as  stimulus  or  coercion.  Russia 
has  not  enough  of  this  tradition.  Hence  we  must  infer 
that  our  history  has  not  given  us  sufficient  social  edu- 
cation. Indeed,  we  may  find  proofs  of  this  on  any 
page  of  Russian  history. 

An  example  will  show  what  I  mean.  Foreign 
travelers  in  ancient  Russia  were  much  struck  by  the 
conduct  of  the  Russian  people  during  a  conflagration. 
No  mutual  aid  was  given,  and  no  common  plan  of 
action  was  organized.  Instead  of  fighting  the  fire,  the 
people  sat  before  their  houses,  holding  the  images  of 
saints,  and  patiently  waiting  till  the  turn  would  come 
for  their  dwelling  to  burn.  The  only  active  conduct 
displayed  was  that  of  some  neighbors  lurking  about, 
waiting  for  the  opportunity  to  rob  any  inadvertent 
persons  who  might  attempt  to  put  out  the  fire  instead 
of  looking  after  their  private  property.  This  is  only  a 
telling  instance  of  the  general  state  of  social  isolation 
we  have  pointed  out. 

To  take  some  of  the  permanent  results  of  this  social 
isolation,  let  us  mention  that  in  Russia  the  very  first 
means  of  any  social  intercourse,  the  language,  has  been 
constantly  changing  and  wavering.  It  remained  un- 
settled until  as  late  as  the  beginning  of  the  nineteenth 
century.  We  mean  here  not  so  much  the  spoken  lan- 
guage of  the  common  people  as  the  language  of  intel- 
lectual intercourse,  the  written  language  of  literature. 
Intellectual  intercourse  was  so  extremely  scanty  that 


20  RUSSIA  AND  ITS  CRISIS 

no  continuous  reaction  of  the  literature  on  life  was 
possible,  and  no  reciprocal  influence  among  authors 
and  their  readers  could  possibly  exist.  Each  author 
stood  comparatively  alone,  working  for  himself,  and, 
left  entirely  to  his  individual  resources,  was  not  likely 
to  alleviate  by  his  work  the  labor  of  the  following 
generations.  Therefore  no  settled  language  in  litera- 
ture and  no  civilizing  tradition  were  possible.  The 
Russian  writers  of  the  eighteenth  century  are  read  and 
understood  in  Russia  with  the  same  difficulty  that  an 
Englishman  would  experience  in  reading  his  Chaucer, 
or  a  Frenchman  his  Montaigne.  Thus  a  continuous 
thread  of  civilizing  literary  tradition  in  Russia  cannot 
be  traced  farther  back  than  about  one,  or  one  and  a 
half,  centuries.  This  may  help  you  to  understand  the 
deficiencies  in  our  social  memory,  and  so  to  explain  the 
lack  of  proper  tradition  in  the  Russian  social  mind. 

And  so,  whatever  branch  of  social  life  we  touch, 
we  shall  find  everywhere  the  same  fundamental  feature 
in  the  Russian  historical  process:  the  lack  of  con- 
tinuity and  the  insufficient  development  of  any  binding 
social  tradition.  More  than  once  in  our  subsequent 
exposition  we  shall  have  occasion  to  point  out  that  in 
the  economic  intercourse  the  idea  of-  property,  in  the 
legal  the  idea  of  law,  in  the  moral  the  idea  of  an 
ethical  sanction,  have  been  but  lately  developed  in  the 
common  consciousness,  and  until  the  present  have 
remained  incomplete. 

To  avoid  a  possible  misunderstanding,  a  reserva- 
tion must  here  be  made.  When  I  characterized  the 
Russian  national  type,  I  necessarily  had  recourse  to 
terms    ("amorphousness,"    "plasticity,"    etc.)    whose 


RUSSIA  AND  THE  UNITED  STATES  21 

meaning  is  not  narrow  enough  to  be  applicable  to  this 

type  alone.      "Good-natured   and   morally   lenient" 

so  I  might  have  summed  up  a  part  of  my  observations 
on  the  Russian  psychological  type;  but  you  will 
remember  that  these  were  the  very  words  used  by  Mr. 
Bryce  to  define  the  American  type.  You  may  have 
observed  now  and  then,  while  I  have  been  speaking, 
that  this  or  that  feature  referred  to,  in  order  to  specify 
the  difference  between  Europe  and  Russia,  might  also 
have  been  used  to  point  out  a  similar  difference  between 
England  and  America.  Of  course,  this  does  not  make 
the  comparison  untrue;  but  it  makes  you  remember 
that  such  comparisons  are  necessarily  relative. 

Anybody  coming  to  Russia  from  western  Europe 
could  not  fail  to  notice  such  deficiencies  in  the  Russian 
character  as  I  have  referred  to.  But  when  I  happened, 
some  years  ago,  to  come  back  to  Russia  after  two  years' 
stay  in  Bulgaria,  my  country  appeared  to  me  to  be  a 
land  of  higher  culture,  and  all  Mr.  Lanin  says  about 
us  I  was  tempted  to  apply  to  the  newly  born  society  of 
the  Balkan  peninsula — I  mean  all  his  negative  charac- 
teristics. I  should  think  a  citizen  of  some  middle  state 
of  America  would  waver  like  that  in  his  appreciation 
of  his  own  surroundings,  according  to  whether  he 
came  home  from  New  England  or  from  California. 

From  what  has  been  said  hitherto  one  might  pos- 
sibly infer  that  the  development  of  Russia  from  its 
primitive  state  has  been  very  slow.  The  contrary 
assertion  would  be  nearer  the  truth.  Far  from  being 
stagnant,  Russian  development  has  proceeded  very 
rapidly,  and  thus  Russia,  having  started  far  behind  tlie 
other  countries,  is  now  overtaking  the  lands  of  more 


22  RUSSIA  AND  ITS  CRISIS 

ancient  culture.  First,  the  material  growth  of  Russia 
has  been  enormous;  in  fact,  this  growth  is  second 
only  to  that  of  the  United  States.  While  at  the  time 
of  Peter  the  Great  (1724)  the  whole  population  of 
Russia  was  only  thirteen  millions,  there  are  now  five 
times  as  many  in  the  same  area  (sixty-five  millions)  ; 
and  the  inhabitants  are  ten  times  as  numerous  (one 
hundred  and  thirty  millions),  if  we  consider  the  whole 
country,  together  with  the  territories  colonized  and 
conquered  since  than.  Two  centuries  ago  the  Russian 
people  formed  about  one-ninth  of  the  whole  population 
of  Europe ;  today  they  make  up  one-third  of  the  Euro- 
peans, that  is.  they  are  proportionally  three  times  as 
numerous  as  formerly.  The  average  density  of  the 
population  (in  European  Russia)  has  grown  during  the 
same  period  from  the  very  insignificant  cipher  of  9.6 
per  square  mile  to  50.5.  The  state  budget  has  risen 
from  some  twelve  millions  of  dollars  to  more  than  one 
thousand  millions;  i.  e.,  nearly  a  hundred  times  as 
much.  The  population  of  the  cities  since  1724  has 
increased  from  328,000  to  16,289,000;  i.  c,  to  nearly 
fifty  times  as  many.  This  may  give  you  an  idea  of  the 
growth  of  the  economic  life  in  Russia  during  these  last 
two  centuries. 

The  social,  the  intellectual,  and  the  moral  growth 
of  Russia  is  far  from  being  so  obvious;  nevertheless 
it  has  been  actually  going  on  very  rapidly.  There  are 
at  hand  no  statistics  with  which  to  make  a  comparison ; 
and  it  would  not  be  right  to  judge  the  rate  of  the 
progress  by  the  modest  results  attained.  To  do  Russia 
justice,  and  simply  be  able  to  understand  her  history, 
we  must  not  forget  what  was  the  starting-point  of  her 


RUSSIA  Ax\D  THE  UNITED  STATES  23 

development.  Russia  had  no  chance  of  building  the 
edifice  of  her  culture  on  such  an  elevation  as  was  given 
to  the  United  States  by  its  English  tradition.  She 
had  to  begin  to  build  on  the  low  level  of  barbarism, 
and  thus  was  obliged  first  to  work  through  centuries  of 
an  almost  unconscious  process  of  growth,  before  the 
mere  possibility  of  a  civilized  existence  had  dawned 
for  her.  Hence  it  was  impossible  for  Russia  to  pre- 
serve the  unity  of  her  political  and  social  tradition 
through  the  course  of  her  historical  growth.  The 
starting-point  was  too  different  from  the  aims  she  is 
striving  after  now.  To  give  you  a  definite  view  of 
this  development,  rapid  and  still  incomplete  as  it  is,  I 
shall  draw  for  you  three  pictures,  representing  the 
state  of  civilizing  ideas  at  the  end  of  each  of  the  last 
three  centuries.  By  comparing  these  we  shall  be  more 
easily  able  to  appreciate  the  measure  of  the  change  in 
Russia. 

Let  us  look  first  at  Moscow,  as  early  as  the  year 
1689,  /.  e.,  just  before  the  reign  of  Peter  the  Great. 
At  that  time  Moscow  was  the  ancient  and  only  capital ; 
nay,  in  the  boundless  woods,  marshes,  and  prairies  of 
Russia,  it  was  the  only  Russian  city  at  all  worthy  of 
the  name.  And  yet  it  was  nothing  more  than  an  enor- 
mous court-yard  around  the  manor-house  of  the  Tsar. 
The  city  was  inhabited  by  the  officials  of  the  Tsar's 
palace  and  by  the  officers  of  the  Tsar's  army.  There 
was  no  room  for  any  abstract  ideas  or  feelings,  in  the 
midst  of  this  world  of  illiterate  churls,  where  only 
every  tenth  man  could  say  his  Lord's  Prayer,  not  to 
mention  the  Apostles'  Creed  and  the  Ten  Command- 
ments.    An  A-B-C  book  or  a  primer  for  reading  was 


24  RUSSIA  AND  ITS  CRISIS 

to  be  found  there  at  the  rate  of  one  copy  per  2,400 
inhabitants;  the  gospel  was  never  read  and,  when 
recited  at  the  mass,  was  heard  without  being  under- 
stood ;  there  was  no  elementary  and  no  regular  second- 
ary school,  even  for  the  clergymen,  and  of  course  no 
higher  school  at  all.  Ideas,  if  any  were  to  be  found 
there,  were  of  a  foreign  importation — a  very  rare 
and  most  severely  prohibited  merchandise,  kept  for  the 
private  use  of  a  few  persons  of  higher  station,  striving 
after  self-culture ;  for  the  most  part  these  ideas  were 
preserved  in  foreign  books  and  carefully  put  up  in 
the  book-cases  of  a  dozen  foreign  merchants  and  higher 
officers.  Some  sparks  there  were  of  a  deeper  and  truer 
piety,  kindled  in  the  depths  of  the  Volga  forests ;  they 
glimmered  dimly  through  the  thick  covering  of  child- 
ish faith  and  half-pagan  ceremonial.  Many  and  many 
a  year  was  still  needed  before  these  sparks  could  be 
fanned  into  a  continuous  and  steady  flame. 

Meantime  another  fire  was  kindled.  In  one  of  the 
market-places  of  the  capital  of  the  Tsars,  on  the  fourth 
of  February,  1689,  a  German  mystic,  Quirinus  Kuhl- 
mann  (a  friend  of  Jane  Leade,  the  founder  of  the 
Philadelphian  Society),  was  burned  at  the  stake.  His 
crime  was  that  he  had  come  to  Moscow  in  order  to 
deliver  a  most  important  prophecy.  The  end  of  the 
world  was  coming,  he  said;  the  Roman  faith  was  to 
be  extinguished,  the  old  apostolic  creed  was  to  triumph 
in  the  whole  world,  and  Christ  alone  w^as  to  rule, 
instead  of  the  motley  crowd  of  princes  and  kings.  All 
men  would  be  equal  thenceforward;  private  property 
would  be  turned  to  common  use,  and  nothing  any 
longer  would  be  called  one's  own.    Righteousness  was 


RUSSIA  AND  THE  UNITED  STATES  25 

to  be  enthroned,  sin  and  lawlessness  were  to  vanish. 
The  poor  dreamer  had  hoped  to  make  the  Russian 
Tsar  his  pupil  and  a  forerunner  of  the  coming  king- 
dom of  God  upon  earth.  But,  of  course,  he  found  no 
ear  among  the  Russian  authorities  and  no  people  to 
listen  to  his  turbid  gospel  of  religious  and  social  free- 
dom; he  was  instead  carried  to  torture,  finishing  his 
life  at  the  stake.  This  happened,  it  is  true,  just  at  the 
time  of  the  Salem  witchcraft  (1692)  ;  but  it  was  also 
the  epoch  when  the  foundations  of  religious  freedom 
and  tolerance  were  laid  in   Great   Britain  and   New 


England. 


A  century  has  passed.  We  are  again  in  the  Rus- 
sian capital,  in  the  year  1789 — the  era  of  the  French 
Revolution.  This  time,  however,  the  capital  is  a  new 
one.  It  bears  a  foreign  name:  it  is  a  Peter's  burgh. 
It  was  built  all  at  once  at  the  imperious  beck  of  a 
revolutionary  ruler;  and  it  has  still  remained  foreign 
to  the  country,  in  spite  of  a  noisy  existence  of  half  a 
century.  As  late  as  the  epoch  of  Catherine  II.  it  still 
remained,  as  Diderot  found  it,  "a  city  of  palaces," 
for  it  contained  very  few  burgher  dwelling-houses. 
Nevertheless  not  only  in  Petersburg,  but  throughout 
Russia,  we  are  now  far  removed  from  that  auto-da-fe 
which  took  place  in  Moscow  only  a  century  before 
(1689).  It  was  in  the  name  of  religion  that  the 
"magic  incantations"  of  the  unhappy  prophet  of  the 
millennium  were  condemned  in  Moscow.  Now,  a 
century  later,  nobody  in  Petersburg  cared  about  the 
official  religion.  Magicians  were  no  longer  burned 
for  the  sake  of  religion.  In  the  time  of  Catherine 
they   were   rather   received    with   open    arms   by   the 


2.6  RUSSIA  AND  ITS  CRISIS 

higher  society,  if  only,  instead  of  preaching  com- 
munism, they  were  wilhng  to  teach  the  people  how  to 
change  baser  metals  into  gold.  But  while  Petersburg 
society  had  entirely  lost  its  religion  and  had  not  fixed 
upon  a  new  ideal  to  strive  for,  the  unofficial — the 
spiritual — religion  was  making  rapid  progress  among 
the  lower  classes.  In  the  civilized  upper  crust  the 
"pre-revolutionary"  ideas  of  religious  and  political 
freedom  were  spreading  at  great  speed.  But  this 
upper  crust  was,  as  yet,  very  thin  indeed,  and  its  mem- 
bers were  quite  powerless  to  apply  new  ideals  to  real 
life.  That  is  why  the  empress,  jealous  as  she  was  of 
her  power,  condescended  to  connive  at  the  spread  of 
these  new  ideas :  they  did  no  harm,  and  they  were  so 
attractive,  so  human!  Thus,  Catherine  II.  professed 
that  she  was  not  afraid  of  her  people's  getting  enlight- 
enment; nay,  she  even  contrived  to  spread  a  net  of 
secondary  schools  all  over  the  country. 

But,  just  as  the  French  Revolution  broke  out, 
everything  was  suddenly  changed.  Catherine  searched 
for  victims  of  her  anger  and  suspicion  among  the 
adherents  of  the  new  ideas ;  she  tried  to  break  up  the 
thin  crust  of  the  newly  formed  public  opinion.  One 
of  the  best  representatives  of  this  public  opinion  was 
Radeeshchev.  He  had  been  sent  by  the  empress  her- 
self to  Germany,  where  he  had  learned  the  lesson  of 
European  civilization  more  deeply  than  any  Russian 
before  him.  Then  he  came  back  to  tell  Russia,  just 
on  the  eve  of  the  Revolution,  what  he  had  learned. 
He  was  cut  short  at  his  first  utterance  of  the  great 
word  of  freedom.  His  book,  A  Journey  from  Peters- 
burg to  Moscozv,  which  has  since  become  renowned, 


RUSSIA  AND  THE  UNITED  STATES  27 

was  condemned  by  the  empress  herself  to  be  burned 
as  revolutionary  and  dangerous.  The  author  was 
first  sentenced  to  death,  and  the  sentence  was  changed 
to  exile  in  Siberia.  This  was  the  first  triumph  of 
Russian  public  opinion,  for  this  treatment  recognized 
it  as  a  force  capable  of  influencing  actual  life.  Still, 
its  further  fate  was  quite  uncertain.  Would  it  recover 
from  the  heavy  blow  it  had  received?  Would  it  get 
new  adherents  and  wider  influence?  Or  might  it  not 
die  in  the  moment  of  its  birth?  These  questions 
remained  unanswered. 

Meanwhile  the  dawn  of  political  freedom  was 
shining  brightly  all  over  Europe,  and  your  own  vener- 
able monument  of  political  art  was  just  raised  in 
Philadelphia.  Russia  had  been  following  the  march  of 
the  world's  civilization  with  rapid  strides,  but  the  road 
stretched  far  ahead. 

Let  us  return,  however,  to  Petersburg  as  it  was 
a  century  later.  Words  had  meanwhile  become 
deeds.  The  best  dreams  of  poor  Radeeshchev  had  been 
carried  into  execution.  Russia  had  got  rid  of  her 
slavery  at  the  very  time  (1861)  when  the  great  war 
against  slavery  began  in  the  United  States.  The 
hearts  of  the  best  men  throbbed  with  joy  at  what  had 
been  achieved,  and  with  hope  for  what  remained  to 
be  done.  People  expected  that  the  building  of  social 
equality  would  soon  be  crowned  by  political  freedom 
and  individual  liberty,  freedom  of  belief,  liberty  of 
the  press  and  of  opinion,  the  rights  of  man  and  of 
citizen,  a  reign  of  law  and  justice,  independent  courts, 
real  self-government.  Public  opinion  seemed  to  glory 
in  its  final  victory,  to  have  taken  its  proper  place  in 


28  RUSSIA  AND  ITS  CRISIS 

political  life.  Vain  hope.  A  few  years  passed,  and 
the  golden  dream  was  once  more  completely  dispelled. 
A  struggle  began,  the  most  merciless  and  violent  that 
Russia  has  ever  seen,  between  authority  and  opinion. 
And  how  did  the  struggle  end?  In  suspicious  and 
narrow  treatment  of  every  living  force  of  the  nation 
on  the  side  of  the  government;  in  bitter  disappoint- 
ment and  rigid  opposition  on  the  side  of  public  opinion. 
Presently  every  scheme  of  further  reform  was  gradu- 
ally eliminated  from  the  field  of  action,  and  their 
promoters  were  exterminated.  This  extermination  of 
the  intermediate  shades  of  public  opinion  resulted  in 
a  terrible  shock  between  the  old  and  the  new,  between 
a  dying  tradition  and  a  buoyant  ideal  of  the  future. 
They  met  face  to  face,  the  old  and  the  new,  and  the 
shock  was  indeed  terrible,  because  there  was  nothing 
left  between  to  soften  the  blow;  no  engine  at  hand 
peacefully  to  convert  the  latent  heat  into  useful  action, 
the  potential  energy  into  actual  work. 

Thus,  as  we  have  seen,  a  mad  millennial  dream 
of  foreign  invention,  the  enthusiastic  anticipation  of 
a  student  of  European  civilization,  and  a  real  political 
struggle  for  a  definite  and  practical  platform — such  are 
the  three  steps  which  Russia  has  achieved  during  the 
last  three  centuries  of  her  history,  on  her  way  from  bar- 
barism to  civilization.  We  must  concede  that  a  nation 
that  was  achieving  this  had  not  been  standing  still.  On 
the  contrary,  the  movement  went  on  so  rapidly  that 
Russia  of  necessity  soon  got  out  of  touch  with  her  old 
tradition,  and  a  question  has  arisen  as  to  the  desirability 
of  this  departure.  While  drifting  from  her  ancient 
moorings,  the  defenders  of  the  old  order  asked :  Was 


RUSSIA  AND  THE  UNITED  STATES  29 

not  Russia  running  the  risk  of  losing  her  very  nation- 
ahty  in  her  mad  race  for  improvement  ?  Would  it  not 
have  been  more  prudent  to  remain  "at  home"  than  to 
start  on  this  long  and  dangerous  journey  of  imitation 
through  Europe?  The  objection  was,  surely,  sense- 
less; the  Russian  nation  is  itself  "European,"  and 
the  process  of  its  remolding  originated,  as  much  as 
elsewhere  in  Europe,  in  internal  evolutionary  causes 
and  not  in  the  fanciful  pleasure  of  "borrowing"  new 
fashions,  or  in  a  mere  craving  for  change  for  change's 
sake.  Change  was  necessary,  and  there  is  nothing  to 
our  discredit  in  having  it.  "To  live  is  to  change,"  as 
Cardinal  Newman  says,  "and  to  be  perfect  is  to  have 
changed  often." 

Still,  objections  are  not  to  be  silenced  by  this  kind 
of  reasoning.  Russia  was  certainly  to  be  civilized,  the 
defenders  of  the  old  tradition  argued ;  but  she  did  not 
need  to  be  civilized  after  the  European  pattern,  as  there 
were  enough  civilizing  elements  in  her  own  tradition. 
True  or  false,  this  argument  has  become  the  crutch  of 
every  reactionary  measure  in  Russia.  Thus,  our  next  ^ 
task  will  be  to  examine  more  closely  what  elements 
of  a  peculiar  civilization  are  inherent  in  the  national- 
istic feelings  and  theories  and  in  the  Russian  historical 
tradition. 


CHAPTER  II 

THE    NATIONALISTIC    IDEA 

It  is  with  intention  that  I  entitle  this  chapter,  not 
the  "national,"  but  the  "nationalistic"  idea.  By  this 
term  I  mean  to  designate  a  particular  kind  of  national 
theory — that  which  declares  certain  national  peculi- 
arities to  be  unalterable  and  exalts  them  as  a  founda- 
tion of  national  life  for  all  future  time.  Civilization 
makes  nations,  as  it  makes  individuals,  look  alike; 
while,  on  the  other  hand,  the  more  backward  a  nation 
is  in  culture,  the  more  likely  it  is  to  be  peculiar,  and  the 
more  scope  is  left  to  such  politicians  as  assert  the  pres- 
ervation of  those  peculiar  features  to  be  its  only  means 
of  political  salvation.  This  is  especially  the  case  in  a 
country  like  Russia,  where  a  new  culture  has  over- 
lapped the  old,  the  two  continuing  to  exist  in  a  per- 
petual contradiction  of  each  other.  Owing  to  this 
situation  in  Russia,  nationalistic  aspirations  and 
theories  have  been  built  up  in  great  number  in  order 
to  defend  the  old  from  the  new,  and  they  have  played 
such  a  large  part  in  political  life  that  the  "nationalistic 
idea"  deserves  a  separate  chapter. 

Of  course,  the  nationalistic  idea  in  itself  lacks  any 
scientific  foundation.  The  peculiarities  of  a  national 
life  cannot  be  considered  "unalterable,"  for  the  reason 
that  in  the  eye  of  modern  science  nothing  is  unalterable. 
What  made  the  old  theories  hold  the  nation  to  be 
unalterable  was  the  fact  that  they  confused  the  idea 

30 


THE  NATIONALISTIC  IDEA  31 

of  the  nation  with  that  of  the  race,  which  seemed  to 
be  unaherable  indeed.  Race  and  nation,  in  fact,  still 
form,  in  the  nationalistic  view,  one  notion.  But,  in 
the  first  place,  in  the  view  of  modern  anthropology, 
not  even  the  race  is  regarded  as  unchangeable;  and, 
in  the  second  place,  the  race,  the  anthropological  type, 
has  nothing  in  common  with  the  nation.  A  nation 
may  include  many  racial  types,  and  one  racial  type 
may  be  scattered  through  many  national  groups.  Of 
course,  a  national  type  implies  a  certain  physical  uni- 
formity; and  this  uniformity  may  be  brought  about 
by  mere  natural  forces,  such  as,  e.  g.,  a  common  descent 
or  the  long  action  of  uniform  natural  surroundings. 
But  natural  forces  of  this  kind  are  not  essential  in 
producing  a  uniform  national  type;  the  best  proof 
of  it  is  that  the  same  forces  may  act  as  well  in  a 
quite  opposite  direction,  by  differentiating  the  national 
type,  instead  of  making  it  uniform  and  homogeneous. 
In  its  very  substance,  national  uniformity  is  some- 
times produced,  not  because,  but  in  spite  of,  natural 
causes;  it  is  thus  not  a  product  either  of  unity  of 
race,  or  of  unity  of  geographical  surroundings;  but 
it  is  of  a  psychological  and  sociological  origin. 
National  uniformity  is  the  result  of  a  long  course  of' 
unconscious  and  half-conscious  imitation  among  the 
members  of  a  given  social  aggregate.  This  kind  of 
social  imitation  is  propagated  in  space  by  conquest 
or  by  peaceful  intercourse;  it  is  perpetuated  in  time 
by  birth  and  tradition,  i.  c,  by  the  natural  growth  and 
the  conscious  education  of  new  generations.  Accord- 
ingly, a  national  type,  as  a  sociological  product,  is  not 
a  group  of  characteristics  that  would  stick  inalienably 


32  RUSSIA  AND  ITS  CRISIS 

to  a  man  or  a  social  group.  The  traits  may  be  arti- 
ficially dissociated.  They  may  be  taught  and  untaught 
by  custom  and  tradition,  as  in  the  United  States  with 
the  immigrant  population.^  The  national  type  may 
even  be  learned  or  unlearned  by  purpose  and  politics, 
as  is  often  the  case  with  mixed  populations  and  with 
small  ethnic  groups,  living  on  the  boundaries  of  many 
large  European  states. 

As  a  rule,  however,  the  uniformity  of  a  national 
type  is  not  the  result  of  a  systematic  policy  or  of  a 
conscious  volition.  It  is  rather  constituted  and  ac- 
quired in  dim  periods  of  national  life,  when  social 
consciousness  is  just  beginning  to  dawn.  This  is 
generally  the  period  when  national  territory  is  framed 
into  a  political  unit,  under  the  leadership  of  a  central 
military  power.  In  Russia  this  process  of  national 
unification  w^as  going  on  at  the  end  of  the  fifteenth 
century.  The  leading  part  fell  to  the  share  of  the 
Duke  of  Moscow.  John  III.  was  the  powerful  ruler 
who  laid  heavy  hands  on  his  prey  and  brought  to  an 
end  the  existence  of  many  smaller  dukedoms  or  more 
weakly  organized  territories,  surrounding  his  central 
seat  of  power.^ 

But  this  period,  when  the  national  type  is  beginning 
to  form  itself  within  a  military  state,  is  far  from  being 
the  time  of  the  full  blossoming  of  national   feeling 

^  A  study  of  the  process  of  assimilation  of  foreign  elements  by 
the  old  American  stock  will  give  one  day  a  clearer  insight  into  the 
laws  of  the  formation  of  nationalities.  European  science  has  a  right 
to  expect  this  contribution  to  sociology  from  American  students 
of  this  branch  of  knowledge  already  so  much  enriched  by  American 
scholars. 

-  See  map  of  the  "  Making  of  the  Russian  State." 


rrm 


The  Muscovite  Dukedom  be- 
fore John  III  (1462). 

The  acquisitions  of  John  III 

and  Basilius  III  (1462-1533). 

The  acquisitions  of  John  IV  |[|||||[| 

and  Theodore  (1533-1598).        UltlMII 

The  acquisitions  of   Michael  kJj^jJ^jJ^ 
(1613-1645).  \/Zr/2 

The  acquisitions  of  Alexis 
(1645-1676). 


The  acquisitions  of  Peter  the    M|hh  The   acquisitions  of  Paul 
Great  (1689-1725).  |H^|  (1796-1801). 

The  acquisitions  of  Anna   frrqTnp  The  acquisitions  of  Alexander 

Ivanovna  (1730-1740).  [     i     'f    1(1801-1825). 

The  acquisitions  of  Elizabeth  ;       "     '    The  acquisitions  of  Nicholas 

(1741-1761).  !...,!  (1825-1855). 

The  acquisitions  of  Catherine  '\  The  acquisitions  of  Alexander 

II  (1762-1796).  I _..^  II  (1855-1881). 


/       r     /-    / 

.L  .  ;    ''  ^'^ 


■v^*^ 


j^   \.. 


I     ' 


*WF.':''BaK^^1WvKC.Ta£3^Ui"tf»^-«W!r-.f±fiEia-y^i?'Se 


,i?.j:'5i-j'..S:}  S 
J j; '.,.;?    "•!  la  f.nbiUf  vp-^  •■^■' 


I  ■•>  ■■■;  r»  *«(>!.' ;'.-.upr5?  •■;* 


.•"■cilS^l)   I '.I  nrf-l^V-     a 

,(j-:;i--    ,••■       .i  en;  •■  .'J  bn..- 


THE  NATIONALISTIC  IDEA  33 

and  nationalistic  theories  in  the  unified  nation.  The 
national  feeling  as  yet  lacks  full  consciousness.  The 
nationalistic  theory  is  late  in  catching  up  with  the 
historical  events  of  national  unification.  Both  feeling 
and  theory  come  later,  as  a  consequence  and  a  vindica- 
tion of  the  accomplished  facts. 

National  consciousness  generally  begins  at  the  time 
when  the  politically  unified  nation  as  a  whole  is  brought 
into  closer  relations  with  some  neighboring  national 
units.  Then  a  comparison  between  the  two  nations 
is  frequently  drawn.  The  results  of  such  a  com- 
parison are  twofold.  First  a  sort  of  self-sufficiency 
and  self-conceit  is  felt.  National  arrogance  thus  ap- 
pears to  be  the  first  utterance  of  the  nationalistic  idea. 
This  feeling  is  particularly  emphasized  if  a  struggle 
for  national  existence  is  carried  on,  no  matter  whether 
the  issue  of  this  struggle  is  disastrous  or  successful. 
But  then — perhaps  simultaneously — the  second  result 
of  the  comparison  appears :  self-criticism  and  self- 
negation.  The  inferior  nation  looks  up  to  the  su- 
perior, supposing  that  there  is  between  the  two  a 
difference  in  culture. 

Between  Russia  and  other  European  countries  the 
contrast  was  not  so  great  at  the  moment  of  their  first 
meeting,  some  centuries  ago,  as  it  is  perhaps  now 
between  Japan  and  the  Europe  of  today.  Therefore 
the  contrast  between  nationalism  and  foreign  culture 
could  not  be  fought  out  in  Russia  in  such  a  rapid  and 
resolute  way,  and  the  victory  over  old  traditions  could 
not  be  so  soon  and  completely  won,  as  would  be  the 
case  today.  Instead  of  that  there  followed  a  long 
process  of  compromise  and  assimilation,  which  in  Rus- 


34  RUSSIA  AND  ITS  CRISIS 

sia  is  even  yet  not  completed.  The  consecutive  stages 
of  compromise  may  be  traced  by  study  of  the  subse- 
quent history  of  the  nationahstic  idea.  The  changes 
Russian  nationahsm  has  undergone  closely  correspond 
to  the  positions  it  alternately  assumed  and  surrendered 
in  its  struggle  with  higher  civilization. 

In  the  very  soul  of  the  nation  there  thus  appears 
a  clash  between  the  awakened  consciousness  of  national 
selfhood  and  the  dawning  consciousness  of  belonging 
to  humanity  in  general.  National  self-consciousness 
clings  to  particular  features  of  national  existence,  such 
as  dress,  dwelling,  social  habits,  political  institutions, 
and  old  forms  of  the  popular  creed.  But  in  the  long 
run  these  features  cannot  be  preserved.  By  and  by 
they  disappear  from  actual  life  and  take  the  shape  of  a 
dim  remembrance  of  a  past  never  to  be  recalled.  And 
while  historical  peculiarities  are  vanishing,  a  notion 
grows  up  that  nationalism  does  not  consist  in  keeping 
to  dead  tradition,  but  in  realizing  the  living  "spirit"  of 
the  nation.  Then  a  right  to  free  action,  to  free  play 
for  inherent  forces  of  the  national  spirit,  is  claimed  in 
the  name  of  the  nation.  But  as  soon  as  this  view  is 
assumed  by  nationalism  its  end  is  near.  For  living 
"spirit"  is  not  to  be  bound  by  a  dead  tradition.  It 
remains  only  to  understand  that  the  national  "spirit" 
is  not  a  metaphysical  "substantia,"  or  a  simple  element 
of  chemistry,  but  an  evolving  and  complex  product  of 
historical  development.  With  this  explanation  nation- 
alism is  ferreted  out  of  its  last  lurking-place,  and  it 
not  only  dies  out,  it  turns  to  its  opposite.  It  thus  kills 
itself  by  the  very  process  of  its  development. 

Indeed,  pari  passu  with  the  growing  appreciation 


THE  NATIONALISTIC  IDEA  35 

of  cosmopolitan  elements  of  culture  grows  the  per- 
ception that  some  of  them  necessarily  exist  already  in 
the  national  spirit  itself.  The  nationalistic  idea  thus 
becomes  messianic;  that  is,  it  begins  to  claim  for  itself 
a  place  in  the  universal  development  of  mankind. 
In  this  stage  of  development  the  nationalistic  idea  has 
already  become  cosmopolitan.  Or  else,  in  order  to 
avoid  this  logical  result,  nationalism  must  recoil  from 
its  own  conclusions  and  stick  more  steadfastly  than 
ever  to  some  institutions  and  habits  peculiar  to  the 
past  history  of  the  nation;  must  become,  in  short, 
reactionary.  But  in  that  case  its  influence  on  actual 
life  is  paralyzed.  Turn  which  way  it  will,  it  arrives 
at  the  same  end — self-annihilation.  Thus,  we  may 
distinguish  three  stages  in  the  development  of  the 
nationalistic  idea.  Nationalism  is  first  instinctive; 
then  it  turns  out  to  be  self-assertive  and  arrogant;  and 
finally  it  becomes  subject  to  criticism  and  a  comparison 
with  some  higher  culture.  At  that  third  stage  the 
nationalistic  idea  is  differentiated  into  two  opposite 
types  :  the  one,  cosmopolitan  and  messianic ;  the  other, 
particular  and  reactionary.  Both  bring  the  national- 
istic idea  to  the  same  upshot — inner  dissolution. 

I  have  now  only  to  substitute  more  Russian  names 
and  data  in  order  to  fill  up  this  general  outline — which 
may  refer  as  well  to  any  backward  country — with  its 
proper  contents. 

I  shall  not  here  dwell  long  on  the  first  two 
stages  of  nationalism  in  Russian  history.  The  national- 
istic idea  as  an  instinctive  feeling  was  characteristic 
of  Russian  ancient  history;  and  in  the  same  state  of 
instinctive  feeling  it  remains  until  now  in  all  but  the 


36  RUSSIA  AND  ITS  CRISIS 

Upper  layers  of  Russian  society.  Thus,  large  stores  of 
crude  national  feeling  are  kept  untouched  against  the 
future.  And  this  is  the  reason  why  Europe  has  always 
been  afraid  of  a  possible  ascendency  of  the  "spirit  of 
conquest"  in  Russia.  But  this  instinctive  feeling  is 
perhaps  much  more  dangerous  to  Russia  itself,  because 
it  is  always  liable  to  deprive  her  of  her  self-control,  as 
was  the  case  in  our  last  war  with  Turkey  (1877-78). 
Or  else  it  may  be  exploited  for  such  shameful  deeds 
as  we  recently  witnessed  in  Kishineff. 

There  follows  then  the  second  stage,  in  the  develop- 
ment of  nationalism;  I  mean  such  first  attempts  at 
consciousness  in  national  feelings  and  theory  as  were 
made  during  the  age  of  national  unification.  But  these 
attempts  are  very  closely  connected  with  what  is  con- 
sidered to  be  Russian  political  and  religious  tradition; 
and  therefore  it  will  be  better  to  make  you  acquainted 
with  them  in  the  two  chapters  next  following,  where 
Russian  tradition  is  to  be  discussed.  You  will  see  there 
that  it  was  the  stage  of  a  serene  self-complacency  and 
unperturbed  self-reliance. 

For  our  present  purpose  it  will  be  more  interesting 
to  dwell  on  the  following — the  third  stage,  when  this 
serenity  of  national  feeling  began  to  give  place  to  a 
vivid  apprehension  of  confusion  and  trouble.  This 
came  to  pass  when  the  contact  with  foreign  culture 
became  so  continuous  as  to  be  considered  dangerous. 
This  condition  was  first  realized  in  Moscow  about  the 
middle  of  the  seventeenth  century. 

Of  course,  foreign  people  lived  in  Moscow  long 
before  that  time;  they  came  there  as  soon  as  the 
political  unification  began,  at  the  end  of  the  fifteenth 


THE  NATIONALISTIC  IDEA  7,7 

century.  But  these  foreigners  were  few  and  remained 
as  yet  unnoticed  by  the  great  bulk  of  the  native  popula- 
tion. Hence  they  were  permitted  to  live  where  and 
how  they  pleased.  From  the  beginning  of  the  seven- 
teenth century,  however,  the  strangers  came  in  crowds 
to  Moscow.  They  entered  Russia  as  commissioned 
officers,  wholesale  merchants  or  trade  agents,  petty 
craftsmen,  or  skilled  artisans  in  the  Tsar's  personal 
service.  Their  number  doubled  in  Moscow  within  the 
first  half  of  the  seventeenth  century,  increasing  from 
about  five  hundred  to  one  thousand — a  great  many  for 
the  Moscow  of  that  time;  they  bought  houses  in  the 
city  and  estates  in  the  province ;  they  conversed  freely 
with  Russian  people,  wore  Russian  clothes,  engaged 
Russian  servants,  and  spoke  the  Russian  language. 
Then  the  Muscovite  clergy  became  alarmed.  The 
patriarch  requested  the  Tsar  to  enjoin  the  strangers 
from  endangering  further  the  Russian  national  habits 
and  creed.  This  request  was  granted :  the  foreigners 
were  ordered  ( 1652-53)  to  sell  their  houses  and  estates, 
and  thenceforward  to  inhabit  a  single  quarter  in  the 
Moscow  suburbs,  since  called  the  "  German  "  quarter. 
But  this  was,  as  they  soon  found,  "  drowning  fish 
in  water."  While  residing  among  the  Russians  the 
foreigners  always  ran  the  risk  of  being  insulted  by 
urchins  or  plundered  by  ruffians;  or  else,  in  the  long 
run,  of  wholly  losing  their  nationality  by  becoming 
Russianized,  Now,  in  the  "  German  quarter  "  they 
lived  at  their  ease  and  thus  were  able  to  preserve 
their  national  habits.  The  new  quarter,  entirely  in- 
habited by  foreigners,  stood  there  close  to  the  walls 
of  the  ancient  city  of  the  Tsar,  a  visible  model   for 


38  RUSSIA  AND  ITS  CRISIS 

imitation.  Russian  people  were  thus  prevented  from 
gradually  intermingling  with  strangers,  with  the  only 
result  that  at  a  later  period  they  were  subjected  to 
the  undisputed  influence  of  European  civilization.  The 
Tsar  Alexis  in  1652  drove  the  strangers  to  a  suburb 
outside  his  capital;  Alexis's  son,  Peter  the  Great, 
came,  forty  years  later,  to  the  suburb  made  "German;" 
he  lived  there  the  European  life  to  the  full,  and  never 
came  back  to  his  father's  home. 

Thus,  before  the  seventeenth  century  came  to  a 
close,  the  danger  for  the  old  nationalism  was  rapidly 
increasing.  Russia  had  to  choose  between  the  old  and 
the  new,  between  the  "Greeks,"  who  gave  Russia  their 
church,  and  the  "  Germans,"  who  were  going  to  give 
Russia  their  culture.  It  w^as  a  compatriot,  a  Slav 
though  not  a  Russian,  the  learned  and  far-seeing 
Croatian,  Georges  Kreeshanich,  who  first  (about  1670) 
pondered  the  issues  of  the  choice.  No  Russian  of  that 
time  had  been  able  to  formulate  so  clearly  and  so  pre- 
cisely what  were  the  chief  points  of  the  conflict  of 
the  two  civilizations  that  met  at  Moscow;  and  he 
paid  for  his  superior  knowledge  and  his  clairvoyance 
by  exile  to  Siberia.  It  was  from  Siberia  that  he  sent  to 
the  Tsar  his  book  on  Politics,  in  which  he  formulates 
for  the  first  time  a  systematic  view  of  what  may  be 
called  a  nationalistic  policy.     Says  Kreeshanich : 

The  Germans  wish  to  poison  us  with  their  novelties;  but 
then,  the  Greeks  inconsiderately  condemn  whatever  is  new; 
and  they  force  upon  us  under  the  false  name  of  antiquity  their 
foolish  inventions.  The  Germans  sow  heresies;  but  the  Greeks 
also  confound  the  true  faith  with  schism  [Kreeshanich  was  a 
Roman  Catholic].  The  Germans  propose  to  teach  us  true  science, 
but  they  mix  it  with  the  arts  of  the  devil;    on  the  other  hand, 


THE  NATIONALISTIC  IDEA  39 

the  Greeks  count  as  heresy  every  bit  of  knowledge,  and  advise  us 
to  remain  in  complete  ignorance.  The  Germans  vainly  hope  to 
be  saved  by  preaching  the  gospel ;  the  Greeks  leave  off  preach- 
ing and  like  better  to  forbear  all  discussion.  The  former  permit 
every  laxity  in  life,  and  thus  lead  us  by  the  broad  way  of  perdi- 
tion ;  the  latter  point  to  a  way  still  narrower  than  that  of 
salvation,  by  summoning  us  to  pharisaic  superstition  and  bigotry. 
The  Germans  denounce  as  barbarous,  tyrannical,  and  inhuman 
whatever  is  Turkish  in  political  matters;  the  Greeks  declare 
the  same  things  to  be  admirable  and  praiseworthy.  The  Germans 
do  not  acknowledge  the  due  rank  of  the  Russian  state;  the 
Greeks  exalt  it  in  a  way  that  is  senseless,  vain,  fictitious,  and 
impossible." 

This  renowned  patriot  advised  the  Russians  to 
choose  the  middle  course  between  these  two  extremes, 
according  to  the  "dictates  of  reason."  Thus  he  hoped 
to  escape  the  danger  of  the  Russian  nationahty's  de- 
struction, whether  by  the  Greeks  or  by  the  Germans, 
a  destruction  which,  as  he  well  knew,  had  come  to 
some  smaller  southern  and  western  Slavonic  groups. 
But  then  there  were  three  things  that  Kreeshanich 
was  not  aware  of.  First,  there  was  at  the  time  he 
wrote  no  national  consciousness  and,  accordingly,  no 
possibility  of  any  reasonable  choice.  In  the  second 
place,  there  was  no  danger  of  the  Russian  nationality 
being  destroyed,  even  if  the  borrowing  of  foreign 
culture  should  go  on  as  inadvertently  and  blindly  as 
possible.  And  last,  though  not  least,  he  did  not  see 
that  there  was  really  no  choice,  that  there  was  only 
one  way  to  civilization,  if  civilization  it  was  to  be: 
that  of  the  West,  not  of  the  East;  that  of  the  "Ger- 
mans," not  of  the  '*  Greeks."  Thus  only  a  quarter  of 
a  century  after  Kreeshanich  wrote,  Russia  was  to  be 

'See  chap,  iv,  pp.  160-64. 


40  RUSSIA  AND  ITS  CRISIS 

made  outwardly  and  manifestly  European.  Peter  the 
Great  had  come. 

Let  us  see  now  what  became  of  the  nationalistic 
feeling  and  theory  after  Russia  had  been  Europeanized 
by  Peter.  Such  nationalistic  tradition  as  had  formed 
in  the  two  preceding  centuries,  the  sixteenth  and 
seventeenth,  by  its  very  essence  could  not  surrender. 
Indeed,  as  we  shall  see  later  (chap,  iii),  it  turned  into 
a  stubborn  opposition  to  the  new  culture,  and,  when 
easily  subdued  in  the  higher  cFasses,  dragged  out  a 
stealthy  existence  in  the  lower  strata,  where  it  persists 
even  to  the  present  time. 

But  among  the  higher  classes  —  the  only  ones  that 
were  as  yet  Europeanized — nationalism  took  an  en- 
tirely new  shape.  It  did  not  remain  in  the  state  of 
instinctive  feeling,  uncompromising  and  inflexible, 
such  as  made  the  masses  and  the  genuine  Muscovite 
opponents  of  the  new  culture  prefer  death  to  surrender. 
On  the  other  hand,  the  higher  society  that  acquiesced 
in  Peter's  reform  was  not  as  yet  guided  in  its  con- 
duct by  a  conscious  theory.  It  got  rid  of  the  in- 
stinctive feeling,  but  had  not  yet  arrived  at  a  theoretical 
foundation  for  any  new  view  of  things.  That  is 
why  it  accepted  the  new  order  of  things  without 
resistance,  but  also  without  sincere  conviction  in  its 
favor.  It  simply  adopted  the  new  social  customs  and 
the  new  style  of  living  because  such  was  the  order 
of  the  Tsar;  but  it  did  not  really  embrace  the  ideas 
of  western  civilization.  With  it  the  imitation  of  for- 
eign culture  was  limited  at  first  to  its  outward  aspects. 

Even  at  this  stage,  however — the  stage  of  a  more 
or  less  unconscious  adaptation  of  the  new  culture — 


THE  NATIONALISTIC  IDEA  41 

the  relation  to  it  was  different  in  individual  members 
of  the  higher  society.  Now  that  the  way  of  imitation 
had  been  decidedly  taken,  everybody  followed  it ;  but 
some  people  w^ent  on  grumbling  and  stubbornly  insist- 
ing that  there  was  nothing  at  all  to  imitate.  While 
enjoying  the  pleasures  and  advantages  of  the  new 
culture,  they  contemplated  a  reaction,  and  looked  back- 
ward to  their  fictitious  national  paradise  of  ancient 
Russia.  Others,  however,  rejected  with  the  same 
fervor  whatever  was  Russian,  and  prided  themselves 
on  being  the  first  to  imitate.  Thus  two  new  social 
types  appeared,  not  unknown  at  this  stage  of  national 
development  in  every  country;  let  us  call  them 
"xenomaniacs"  and  "xenophobists" — the  friends  and 
the  enemies  of  the  imported  culture.  Both  were  far 
from  leaning  upon  any  conscious  theory,  as  we  have 
already  said;  both  were  the  immediate  products  of 
life,  not  of  theoretical  training.  A  w'ounded  national 
vanity  was  their  chief  motive  in  both  extremes  of 
imitation  and  rejection  of  the  foreign  culture.  Both 
types  were  also  soon  caricatured  in  literature  and 
ridiculed  by  witticisms  of  Russian  satirical  writers, 
the  literary  imitators  of  Steele  and  Addison.  And, 
indeed,  those  types  were  grotesque  enough.  Let  us 
take,  by  way  of  illustration,  a  description  of  them 
drawn  from  life  by  a  foreign  traveler,  soon  after  their 
first  appearance  and  long  before  they  had  had  time  to 
be  represented  by  Russian  literature.  I  translate  the 
following  from  a  book  by  Peter  Haven,  a  Hollander, 
who  traveled  in  Russia  during  the  years  1736-39. 

This  is  a  portrait  of  a  Russian  lady,  profitmg  freely 
by  the  new   fashions   and   manners   of  life.      In   the 


42  RUSSIA  AND  ITS  CRISIS 

second  half  of  the  century  she  will  appear  in  Russian 
satire  as  a  "coquette,"  an  elegante,  with  her  male 
counterparts,  the  "dandy,"  the  pctit-maitre.  It  is  not  a 
literary  sketch,  but  an  illustration  from  life  of  the 
young  Princess  Koorakin: 

She  has  a  whole  court  round  her.  She  drives  six-in-hand, 
with  two  post-boys  and  four  footmen.  She  has  two  dozen 
chamber-maids  and  as  many  men-servants.  She  eats  luxuriously 
and  at  no  fixed  time,  sleeps  until  noon,  and  dresses  like  an  opera- 
singer.  Though  she  speaks  nothing  but  Russian,  she  mixes  up 
so  many  French  and  Italian  words  with  Russian  endings  that 
it  is  far  easier  for  a  foreigner  to  understand  her  than  for  a 
native.  In  her  talking  she  generally  extols  French  fashions  and 
liberty  of  social  manners.  She  laughs  at  pious  women,  who 
lament  the  world's  vanity,  simply  because  they  themselves  have 
no  chance  of  marrying.  Her  own  love  stories  are  apt  to  prove 
that  in  Moscow  you  may  play  no  worse  amorous  dramas  than  in 
London  or  Paris. 

Let  US  look  next  at  a  worthy  old-fashioned  couple, 
Prince  and  Princess  Cherkasski : 

The  prince  asked  me  whether  I  understood  Russian.  "Yes,  a 
little,"  I  said.  The  prince  then  retorted  that  he  could  not  allow 
anybody  to  speak  with  him  otherwise  than  in  Russian  while  in 
his  country,  because  when  traveling  he  had  always  been  obliged 
to  speak  the  language  of  the  country  he  was  in.  "I  should  like 
to  know,"  he  went  on,  "why  the  Russian  language  should  not  be 
put  on  the  same  level  with  French  or  German?"  I  answered 
that  perhaps  the  reason  was  that  the  sciences  were  not  yet 
flourishing  in  Russia;  therefore  the  language  was  not  much 
in  use  and  little  studied.  Again,  another  reason  might  be  that 
the  Russian  state  only  recently  had  begun  to  be  held  in  esteem 
by  foreigners ;  with  the  power  of  the  state  would  also  grow  the 
appreciation  of  the  language.  The  prince  was  appeased  by  this ; 
but  then  the  princess  asked  me  whether  I  was  a  German.  I  said 
I  was  not.  Then  she  took  off  her  hat,  made  in  the  English 
fashion  and  wanted  me  to  say  whether  I   really  thought  that 


THE  NATIONALISTIC  IDEA  43 

things  like  that  ought  to  be  ordered  from  abroad.  I  said  this 
fault  was  fully  redeemed  by  the  good  quality  of  the  hat  and  the 
impossibility  of  getting  it  otherwise.  "Well,  now,"  the  princess 
rejoined,  "my  slave  has  made  it  for  me  here  in  Moscow ;  thus, 
you  see,  we  don't  want  German  goods,  any  more  than  we  want 
the  Germans  themselves,  to  come  here  into  Russia. 

Such  were  the  first  types  of  newly  cultured  people 
that  made  their  appearance  in  the  higher  society  of 
Russia  in  consequence  of  Peter  the  Great's  reforms. 
You  have  observed,  perhaps,  that  of  the  two  types 
thus  sketched  by  Haven  the  more  grotesque  is  that  of 
the  dashing  lady,  Princess  Koorakin.  In  fact,  the 
new  imitators  of  European  culture  offered  much  more 
material  for  satire  than  its  old-fashioned  detractors. 
The  reason  was  that  the  influence  of  European  culture 
remained  quite  superficial.  The  real  need  for  this 
culture  was  felt  by  the  state  only,  which  borrowed 
from  abroad  plans  of  military,  naval,  and  administra- 
tive institutions.  Beyond  these  mere  technicalities,  the 
only  use  made  of  foreign  culture  at  first  was  for  the 
amenities  of  life. 

But  very  soon  the  new  standard  of  life  brought 
in  from  abroad  began  to  serve  another  more  practical 
end.  As  the  higher  classes  alone  imitated  Europe,  the 
new  culture  became  a  mark  of  social  distinction. 
French  dress,  French  wines,  French  meals,  and,  last 
but  not  least,  the  French  language  served  to  dis- 
tinguish the  Russian  nobility  from  the  bulk  of  the 
people.  All  that  was  not  noble  was  "vile;"  thus 
ancient  Russian  clothes  and  habits  and  creed  became 
so  many  attributes  of  the  "vile  people,"  of  peasants, 
merchants,  and  clergy.  Thus  the  higher  classes — the 
nobility  and  the  gentry — for  the  first  time  in  Russian 


44  RUSSIA  AND  ITS  CRISIS 

history  were  entirely  and  outwardly  dissociated  from 
the  lower  strata.  Later  on  (see  p.  339)  we  shall  see 
that  just  then  slavery  had  attained  its  full  development 
in  Russia.  Thus  European  culture  had  become  a 
property  of  the  privileged  landed  aristocracy.  Thence- 
forward there  were  to  exist  in  Russia  two  cultures,  two 
systems  of  tradition,  almost  two  differait  languages. 
The  "vile"  multitude  provided  suppHes  for  the  "noble" 
few  who  lived  in  opulence  and  luxury.  The  common 
people  had  to  live  the  life  of  toil  and  suffering  in  order 
that  their  "landlords"  might  live  in  a  world  of  fiction. 
Thus  the  civilized  type  of  the  higher  society  became 
such  as  was  known  abroad  until  the  epoch  of  the 
emancipation  of  the  serfs.  Broad  ways  of  living, 
liberal  hospitality,  literary  refinement,  together  with 
entire  incapacity  for  actual  work  and  the  lack  of  any 
real  interest  in  life — these  were  supposed  sometimes 
to  be  the  features  of  the  Russian  national  type.  But 
they  were  only  features  of  the  Russian  "noble"  during 
the  period  of  slavery.  This  was  the  type  of  the  Rus- 
sian bahrin  (landlord). 

This  necessary  digression  may  help  you  to  under- 
stand the  further  history  of  nationalism  in  Russia. 
Both  types  of  xenomaniacs  and  xenophobists  were 
thriving  amidst  the  privileged  nobles;  but  there  was 
something  unreal,  something  fictitious  and  conven- 
tional, about  them.  Whether  they  extolled  either 
merry  old  Russia  or  the  advantages  of  civilization — 
all  that  was  mere  idle  talk.  The  real  partisans  of  the 
old  traditions,  the  "Old-believers,"  as  well  as  the  real 
admirers  of  Europe,  were  hardly  to  be  sought  in  their 
midst.    The  former  were  to  be  found  only  in  the  lower 


THE  NATIONALISTIC  IDEA  45 

classes;  the  latter,  nowhere  but  among  the  very  few 
really  educated  people. 

The  real  discussion  of  principles  concerning  nation- 
alism or  European  culture  went  on  only  among  these 
last,  the  cultivated  few — in  Petersburg,  in  the  imme- 
diate neighborhood  of  the  throne,  and  in  close  con- 
nection with  the  higher  schools  opened  by  the  succes- 
sors of  Peter  the  Great."*  A  few  Petersburg  journal- 
ists began  by  ridiculing  both  the  xenomaniacs  and 
xenophobists.  Sincere  adherents  of  European  culture 
though  they  were,  they  exposed  to  derision  particularly 
the  civilized  type,  the  xenomaniacs,  just  for  the  reasons 
that  we  have  seen,  i.  c,  that  these  were  representatives 
of  the  privileged  class,  using  new  culture  only  as  a 
mark  of  social  distinction.  Thus  the  democratic  jour- 
nalists of  St.  Petersburg  went  even  so  far  as  to  sigh 
for  the  homely  and  patriarchal  virtues  of  the  good  old 
time,  that  were  vanishing  forever  w^ith  the  new  culture 
of  the  privileged  few.  '^ 

But  the  most  prominent  of  these  journalists,  the 
renowned  Novekov,  very  soon  remarked  that  the 
empress  Catherine  11.  was  trying  to  turn  these  mourn- 
ings to  her  own  advantage,  and  then  he  desisted  at 
once  from  lamenting  the  imaginary  virtues  of  the  Rus- 
sian past.  We  know  (sec  p.  26)  that  Catlierine  found 
new  ideas  dangerous  to  the  existing  order  of  things, 
and  thus  gradually  ranged  herself  with  the  defenders 
of  the  ancient  tradition.  Looking  about  for  some 
theoretical  support  of  her  reactionary  aspirations,  she 
thought  of  utilizing  Russian  satire  for  the  derision  of 
ne^v  ideas.     She  expressly  wanted  Novekov  tc  exalt 

*  See  chap,  v,  p.  274. 


46  RUSSIA  AND  ITS  CRISIS 

old  national  virtues  and  to  ridicule  their  detractors. 
But  far  from  having  obtained  what  she  wanted,  she 
only  made  a  few  liberal  publicists  of  Petersburg  aware 
that  they  were  running  the  risk  of  being  used  as  a  cat's- 
paw  for  her  own  political  views.  Then  for  the  first 
time  the  boundary  line  was  drawn  between  the  de- 
fenders of  the  backward  and  of  the  forward  movement 
in  Russia.  The  government  was  with  the  former ;  the 
liberals  were  gathering  around  the  banner  of  opposi- 
tion. From  that  moment  the  nationalistic  theory  re- 
ceived a  governmental  and  reactionary  meaning,  which 
it  has  preserved  up  to  the  present  time. 

Curiously  enough,  now  that  the  practical  necessity 
of  a  nationalistic  theory  was  felt  by  the  government, 
the  elements  required  for  it  were  found  to  be  entirely 
lacking.  The  old  traditions  of  Russia  before  Peter  the 
Great  had  been  entirely  forgotten,  and  the  historic 
study  of  them  had  not  yet  begun.  On  the  other  hand, 
the  higher  class  had  definitely  adopted  European  cul- 
ture and  clung  to  it,  because  of  its  convenience.  The 
predominant  theory  of  European  literature  at  that  time 
was  not  in  the  least  propitious  to  the  building  of  a 
nationalistic  theory.  In  the  enlightened  age  of  ration- 
alism the  idea  of  "nation"'  was  drowned  in  the  larger 
idea  of  "mankind."  Men  were  thought  to  be  equal  by 
"natural  right"  all  over  the  world.  The  subjugated 
nations  were  to  be  free,  not  for  the  sake  of  their 
separate  and  particular  existence,  but  in  order  to  fra- 
ternize with  the  whole  of  mankind  in  one  cosmopolitan 
type  of  universal  democracy.  There  was  no  room  for 
exalting  national  peculiarities,  especially  in  a  land  like 
Russia,  which  so  entirely  lacked  tradition. 


THE  NATIONALISTIC  IDEA  47 

Thus,  when  Catherine  II.  was  forming  her  national- 
istic theory,  she  was  obHget:!  to  start  from  an  axiom 
as  contradictory  as  possible  to  the  very  essence  of 
nationalism.  She  had  to  accept  as  proved  the  proposi- 
tion that  "men  are  the  same  always  and  everywhere." 
The  idea  was  not  bad  when  Russia  was  to  be  defended 
against  her  foreign  detractors.  But  the  use  Catherine 
made  of  it  was  quite  wrong.  She  affirmed,  in  her 
criticism  of  a  FVench  writer  on  Russia,  the  abbe 
Chappe  d'Auteroche,  that  Russia  stood  on  the  same 
level  with  Europe;  that  Russia  was  as  good  in  every- 
thing— or  as  bad,  as  the  case  may  be — as  western 
Europe.  In  literary  skirmishes  with  her  own  subjects 
she  went  a  step  farther  in  building  a  nationalistic 
theory :  whatever  was  bad  in  Russia  she  declared  to 
come  of  foreign  origin,  from  Scythians  and  Sar- 
matians  of  old,  and  from  the  French  at  present.  What- 
ever was  good  was  to  be  considered  as  old  Russian. 

All  this  did  not  go  beyond  mere  playing  with 
abstract  and  historical  ideas.  At  last  a  writer  came 
who  helped  Catherine  to  a  better  insight  into  the  real 
Russian  peculiarities.  This  was  Bolteen,  the  historian. 
He  started  from  an  assumption  quite  contrary  to  that 
which  Catherine  had  made.  Russians  were  to  be 
thought,  not  as  like  and  equal  to  Europeans,  but  as  dif- 
ferent and  peculiar.  The  reason  of  this  difference  was 
to  be  sought  in  the  outward  conditions  of  historical 
growth,  especially  in  the  climate,  where  Montesquieu 
and  Bodin  had  already  found  it.  Undeveloped  as  this 
theory  was,  it  was  the  first  really  important  step 
toward  the  construction  of  a  nationalistic  theory  for 
Russia.     But  there  was  still  wanting  an  important  ele- 


48  RUSSIA  AND  ITS  CRISIS 

ment  to  make  this  theory  really  nationalistic.  Such 
peculiarities  as  Bolteen  found  in  Russian  history  were 
only  relative,  not  absolute.  There  was  nothing  in 
either  to  prove  the  superiority  of  the  Russian  nation 
over  the  other  nations.  On  the  contrary,  the  Russian 
nation  would  have  to  be  put  on  the  same  level  with 
others,  if  history  was  to  be  explained  by  the  general 
laws  of  nature. 

Thus,  the  eighteenth  century  in  Russia  saw  a 
great  development  of  national  feeling,  and  of  curious 
national  types ;  but  it  did  not  witness  the  building  of  a 
nationalistic  theory;   the  times  were  not  ripe  for  that. 

Nationalistic  theory  was  essentially  the  work  of 
the  nineteenth  century.  With  it  appeared  the  romantic 
idea  of  nationality. 

The  French  Revolution  had  just  proved  a  failure. 
The  Napoleonic  wars  and  conquests  had  spread  over 
all  Europe  a  rapidly  growing  discontent  with  French 
fashions  and  with  French  ways  of  living  and  thinking. 
This  discontent  prepared  public  opinion  in  France  and 
other  countries  of  Europe  for  a  sudden  return  from 
French  rationalism  to  the  old  national  tradition.  A 
new  intellectual  movement  set  in,  known  as  romanti- 
cism. It  entirely  changed  the  views  of  theorists  and 
politicians  concerning  the  question  of  nationality.  Ac- 
cording to  the  previous,  the  rationalistic,  idea  a  nation 
was  looked  at  as  a  sum  of  individual  units,  entirely 
equal  one  to  another  and  bound  together  by  a  formal 
or  tacit  act  of  "social  compact."  This  idea  was  now 
condemned  and  rejected  as  too  abstract,  too  formal,  and 
too  mechanical.  The  concrete  and  living  nationality 
was  reinstalled  in  its  rights  by  romanticism ;  and  it  was 


THE  NATIONALISTIC  IDEA  49 

looked  at  as  an  organic  whole,  as  a  unit  acting  on  a 
kind  of  collective  impulse.  Rationalism  had  once  op- 
posed reason  to  Providence;  the  will  of  individual  man 
to  the  will  of  God  in  the  making  of  history.  It  had 
hoped  to  reconstruct  the  whole  fabric  of  society  with 
the  help  of  law  made  by  reason.  On  the  other  hand,  the 
first  principle  of  romanticism  in  politics  was  that  human 
law  is  powerless  against  the  law  of  nature,  and  thus 
no  intentional  reconstruction  of  the  social  order  is 
ever  possible.  The  law  of  social  phenomena  cannot  be 
changed  by  individual  will  or  reason.  Thus  far  roman- 
ticism agreed  that  there  was  a  law  in  history;  and  it 
was  obliged  to  admit  that  this  law  was  independent 
even  of  God's  momentary  will.  This  idea  born  of  ro- 
mantic thought  made  a  very  important  contribution  to 
sociology.  According  to  this  fundamental  conception, 
history  was  not  to  be  understood  in  a  rationalistic  way 
as  a  series  of  accidents,  resulting  from  the  personal 
will  and  exertion  of  man;  but  neither  was  it  to  be 
explained  in  a  supernatural  way  as  a  series  of  miracles, 
produced  by  God's  intermittent  attempts  to  force  his 
own  will  upon  the  natural  drift  of  events.  Between  a 
world  of  chance  and  a  world  of  miracles,  romanticism 
interposed  an  intermediate  notion,  that  of  a  world  of 
natural  law,  preformed  by  God  and  realized  by  man's 
unconscious  volition.  The  romanticists  were  the  first 
to  make  this  sort  of  unconscious  volition  a  subject  of 
study  and  trace  it  to  its  sociological  origin.  The  role 
of  individual  actor  was  thus  to  be  explained  by  an 
inherent  law  of  society. 

A  nation  is,  according  to  the  romantic  idea,  society 
acting  unconsciously  as  a  living  aggregate  of  like- 


50  RUSSIA  AND  ITS  CRISIS 

minded  and  like-intentioned  beings.  Such  a  nation, 
being  subject  to  God's  will  and  superior  to  individual 
volition,  is  a  tool  in  God's  hands  to  lead  humanity 
toward  its  final  destination.  The  universal  history  of 
mankind  is  made  up  of  a  succession  of  many  pre- 
destined nations,  each  playing  its  part  on  the  way  of 
mankind  to  that  supreme  end  known  to  none  but  God. 
Every  nation  has  its  own  particular  "idea"  which  it  is 
predestined  to  realize  on  this  royal  road  of  history; 
and  this  peculiar  "idea"  forms  the  very  essence  of  the 
nation — its  inmost  "spirit"  and  its  inborn  soul,  pre- 
formed since  the  beginning  of  time  in  the  Eternal 
Council.  This  "spirit"  is  the  very  core  of  the  nation, 
the  source  of  its  living  force,  of  its  will,  of  its  "free- 
dom." Of  course,  it  is  to  be  thought  unchanging  and 
unchangeable;  on  its  durability  the  very  existence  of 
a  nation  depends. 

Such  was  the  theory  created  by  a  group  of  thinkers, 
politicians,  and  philosophers  in  France  and  Germany 
on  the  verge  of  two  centuries.  The  political  meaning 
of  the  theory  was,  however,  different  in  the  two 
countries.  In  France  the  theory  took  on  a  reactionary 
meaning,  owing  to  the  violent  opposition  to  the  French 
Revolution.  There  were  two  nobles,  both  men  of 
political  action,  who  formulated  in  that  country  the 
romantic  theory  in  question,  De  Maistre  and  De 
Bonald.  In  Germany  the  popular  opposition  was 
directed  rather  against  French  rule  and  French 
fashions  than  against  the  revolutionary  ideas  of  France. 
The  revival  of  national  feeling  here  went  hand  in 
hand  with  the  movement  for  political  freedom.  Thus 
it  was  understood   in   Germany  that   God's  plan   in 


THE  NATIONALISTIC  IDEA  51 

history  was  that  of  the  ''education  of  the  nation  for 
freedom,"  and  while  French  pohticians  were  tending 
to  restore  the  ancient  national  institutions  by  means 
of  their  romantic  theory,  the  Germans  preferred  to 
sound  the  depths  of  the  living  "soul"  and  "spirit"  of 
the  nation.  This  national  theory  was  promulgated 
mainly  by  Fichte,  in  his  renowned  Speeches  to  the 
German  People  in  1808.  Then  appeared  Hegel's 
Philosophy  of  History,  in  which  a  particular  place  was 
assigned  to  every  "historical"  nation,  worthy  of  repre- 
senting some  "idea"  in  the  solemn  march  of  universal 
history;  and,  as  was  natural,  the  German  people  took 
the  lead. 

This  was  the  theory  that  was  adopted  by  the 
Russian  nationalists  of  the  nineteenth  century.  Thus, 
by  a  curious  irony  of  history,  the  first  and  only  nation- 
alistic theory  ever  developed  in  Russia  lay  on  the 
foundations  of  western  European  philosophic  thought ; 
and  we  must  add  that  this  theory  was  very  old  in 
western  Europe  when  it  was  first  heralded  by  Rus- 
sian nationalists.  Russia,  indeed,  was  slow  in  adopt- 
ing the  romantic  theory.  Very  little  of  it  was  known 
until  the  reign  of  Nicholas  I.,  i.  e.,  the  second  quar- 
ter of  the  nineteenth  century.  In  the  first  quarter 
of  the  nineteenth  century  Russia's  national  feeling^ 
it  is  true,  burst  into  flame,  in  consequence  first,  of  the 
Napoleonic  wars,  and,  then,  of  the  national  revolutions 
of  the  second  decennium  in  Europe.  But  very  soon  a 
reaction  against  French  fashion  turned  in  Russia  into 
a  rough  chauvinism,  deprived  of  any  theory.  The  old 
Russian  virtues  were  exalted,  just  as  the  Teutonic 
virtues  were  in  Germany;   only  there  came  no  Fichte, 


52  RUSSIA  AND  ITS  CRISIS 

and  there  was  no  talking  about  the  free  utterance  of 
the  national  spirit.  There  was,  to  be  sure,  a  political 
movement,  which  had  set  in  some  years  later  in  Rus- 
sia— at  the  period  of  Congresses,  1818-22 — but  it 
was  liberal,  not  romantic;  and  so  its  theory  is  to  be 
traced  to  Benjamin  Constant,  the  French  statesman, 
rather  than  to  the  German  philosophers,  Fichte  and 
Hegel.  This  movement,  resulting  in  the  December 
insurrection  of  1825,  has  no  place  in  this  chapter;  we 
shall,  however,  return  to  it  when  we  come  to  trace 
the  history  of  Russian  liberalism  (see  p.  254-59). 
»^  A  genuine  romantic  movement  was,  however, 
started  in  Russia  immediately  after  this  insurrection  of 
the  so-called  "Decembrists"  only  in  a  quite  different 
environment :  not  in  Petersburg,  but  in  Moscow ;  and 
not  among  the  officers  of  the  guards  and  the  army,  but 
among  the  students  of  the  university.  This  movement 
soon  became  known  as  Slavophilism.  After  two  dec- 
ades of  preliminary  development,  it  culminated  in  an 
organized  theory  of  Russian  nationalism. 

The  university  movement  in  Moscow  had  nothing 
in  common  with  revolution  and  politics.  It  was 
closely  connected  with  German  metaphysics  and  par- 
ticularly with  Hegel's  philosophy  of  history.  Slavo- 
philism began  to  build  up  its  theory  just  at  the  point 
where  Hegel  stopped.  The  Slavophils  took  for 
granted  everything  Hegel  had  said  about  the  universal 
development  of  nations;  but  they  completed  his  phi- 
losophy of  history  with  a  chapter  of  their  own.  If 
Hegel  were  right,  Germans  were  to  be  at  the  head 
of  humanity,  and  there  was  no  place  left  for  Slavs. 
Now,  Slavs  were  not  to  be  thought  outside  the  world 


THE  NATIONALISTIC  IDEA  53 

of  law;  they  too  must  have  a  universal  "idea"  to  be 
realized  in  history.  Of  course,  no  "universal"  idea 
had  as  yet  appeared  in  their  past;  but  this  only  proved 
to  the  Slavophils  that  the  ascendency  of  the  Slavs  was 
to  be  in  the  future.  They  thought  they  would  bide 
their  time,  and  then,  forming  a  fresh  nation,  unworn 
by  life's  humiliating  experience,  they  would  forge 
ahead  of  the  Germans  and  of  all  the  rest  of  the  "  rotten 
West,"  as  they  called  it. 

What,  then  was  the  "  universal  idea  "  that  Russia, 
and  Slavs  in  general,  were  to  exhibit  for  the  benefit 
of  mankind  ?  The  answer  to  this  question  is  the  very 
essence  of  Slavophilism. 

The  civilization  of  the  West,  they  found,  was  rich 
and  luxuriant;  but  at  the  same  time  it  was  one-sided 
and  incomplete.  Rationalism  was  its  original  sin; 
rationalism  divorced  reason  and  feeling,  and  therefore 
the  western  civilization  failed.  Whatever  branch  of 
the  life  in  western  Europe  we  look  at,  everywhere  we 
are  likely  to  find  the  same  phenomenon  of  discord 
and  inner  contradiction  unappeased  by  feeling.  In  the 
state,  it  is  the  struggle  between  subjects  and  authority; 
in  religion,  that  between  Scripture  and  tradition;  in 
philosophy,  between  reason  and  experience;  in  social 
life,  between  the  upper  and  the  lower  classes;  in  social 
conduct,  between  law  and  morals.  Russia,  on  the  other 
hand,  was  always  striving  to  unite  and  reconcile  the 
conflicting  elements  of  life.  And  that  is  why  the 
Slavophils  reasoned  that  her  civilization  is  bound  to 
become  wholesome  and  complete. 

It  is  generally  known  what  part  feeling  played  in 
the  romantic  theory.     Feeling  was  opposed  to  reason ; 


54  RUSSIA  AND  ITS  CRISIS 

it  was  thought  to  be  the  only  way  to  that  superior 
truth  which  science  can  never  discover  for  us.  The 
weapon  of  science  is  logic;  and  logic  is  not  able  to 
grasp  the  essence  of  phenomena,  to  introduce  us  to  the 
inner  meaning  of  things.  Logic  is  only  formal;  life 
and  every  living  trait  slips  through  its  loosely  woven 
net.  These  traits  of  concrete  things  are  retained  in 
our  minds  only  by  feeling;  feeling  supplies  us  with 
sounds  and  color  —  with  all  the  motley  of  actual  life. 
Art,  therefore,  which  speaks  to  us  in  pictures  and 
appeals  to  our  feeling,  is  a  higher  type  of  knowledge 
than  science.  And  for  the  same  reason  religion  is  the 
highest  of  all  possible  types  of  knowledge:  it  gives 
us  communication  with  the  very  origin  of  the  living 
actuality  of  things. 

Now,  the  Slavophils  go  on  arguing,  it  is  only  in 
the  East  that  religion  has  gone  the  way  of  feeling. 
Western  religion  has  chosen  the  way  of  reason  and 
logic,  and  so  has  run  astray,  becoming  the  victim  of  its 
own  infatuation  and  lack  of  humility.  The  eastern 
church  alone  knows  what  is  the  right  way  for  human 
progress,  and  toward  eternal  salvation. 

Religion  makes  up  the  essence  of  civilization. 
Hence  the  western  civilization  has  erred  in  the  erring 
of  its  religion.  Roman  Catholicism  was  western  civili- 
zation's first  step  in  the  error  of  forsaking  the  collective 
feeling  of  the  church  for  individual  judgment  in  reli- 
gious matters.  The  second  step  in  rationalism  was  the 
Reformation;  and  it  was  the  necessary  consequence 
of  the  first :  just  a  step  farther  toward  individualism. 
The  third  and  last  step  in  the  succession  of  this  logical 
necessity  was  revolution  and  atheism.     None  of  these 


THE  NATIONALISTIC  IDEA  55 

was  possible  in  tlie  eastern  world,  it  being  the  world 
of  traditional  religion — the  religion  of  love  and  hu- 
mility. 

Thus  the  essence  of  the  eastern  civilization  is  Chris- 
tian self-absorption  in  love.  Now,  is  this  feature  to  be 
found  in  Russian  history?  The  Slavophils,  to  be  sure, 
found  plenty  of  it.  The  community  of  Christian  love 
— was  it  not  identical  with  the  Russian  village  com- 
mune that  was  supposed  to  form  a  peculiar  feature  of 
the  Russian  social  life?  Was  there  to  be  found  in 
the  inner  life  and  order  of  the  Slavic  commune  any- 
thing like  western  formal  law?  Was  there  a  differ- 
ence between  rich  and  poor,  an  idea  of  private  landed 
property?  Was  not  the  origin  of  that  village  com- 
munity hidden  in  the  remote  past,  so  that  it  fitly  repre- 
sented the  unalterableness  of  the  "spirit  of  the  nation"  ? 
Thus  the  key  to  the  explanation  of  Russian  culture 
was  found.  Christian  love  and  landed  peasant  com- 
munity— these  were  the  particular  "ideas"  to  be  intro- 
duced by  Russia  into  the  universal  history  of  man- 
kind.^ Everything  that  did  not  agree  with  these 
"ideas"  in  Russian  history  itself  was  to  be  explained 
as  foreign,  and  eliminated.  Foreign,  in  the  first  place, 
was  the  state,  with  all  its  worldly  sins  which  did  not 
befit  the  community  of  Christian  love.  The  "com- 
monalty" of  people,  the  "land" — this  was  the  genuine 
national  element  in  Russia.  The  government  origi- 
nated in  a  military  association  of  the  prince's  followers, 
(the  gesith)  ;  thus  it  had  come  from  abroad  and  had 
remained  foreign  to  the  "commonalty  of  the  land." 

■^  See  further  applications  of  this  theory  for  radical  purposes, 
on  p.  366. 


56  RUSSIA  AND  ITS  CRISIS 

This  was  the  reason  why  the  upper  classes  were  so 
easily  conquered  by  foreign  civilization  after  the  reform 
of  Peter  the  Great  began.  They  were  foreign  by 
origin ;  their  high  treason  before  the  nation  was,  as  it 
were,  hereditary.  And  yet  the  Russian  state  was  not 
so  bad  as  the  western  European,  because  there  was  a 
great  difference  between  Russia  and  western  Europe 
as  to  the  way  in  which  the  state  was  built.  Russian 
princes  and  barons  ("thegns")  had  not  conquered  the 
Russian  natives,  as  was  the  case  with  the  building  up 
of  the  mediaeval  states  in  western  Europe.  Slavophils 
laid  much  stress  upon  the  old  Scandinavian  legend 
with  which  Russian  history  opens.  According  to  this 
legend,  the  first  rulers  were  voluntarily  called  by  Rus- 
sian and  Finnish  tribes  from  the  Northmen  in  order 
to  preserve  "peace"  in  the  "land."  Thus  the  state 
authorities  came  from  outside  and  remained  foreign 
to  the  genuine  life  of  the  nation.  They  liberated  the 
"land"  from  the  material  duty  of  keeping  "external 
right"  and  order;  the  nation  was  free  to  go  its  own 
way  of  "internal  righteousness."  No  conflict  what- 
ever was  thenceforward  possible  between  the  state 
and  the  nation;  the  nation — the  "land" — retained  its 
"right  of  opinion,"  but  never  aspired  to  share  in  the 
"power"  of  the  state.  The  "right  of  opinion"  was 
embodied,  according  to  the  Slavophils,  in  the  Old  Rus- 
sian States  General;  the  "power"  of  the  state  was 
embodied  in  autocracy,  which,  however,  never  inter- 
fered with  people's  "opinion,"  up  to  the  unhappy  mo- 
ment when  this  original  compact  was  broken  by  Peter 
the  Great. 

Thus,  both  the  Russian  state  and  religion  were 


THE  NATIONALISTIC  IDEA  57 

Utterly  idealized  in  the  theory  of  the  Slavophils.  In 
this  idealized  shape  they  resembled  the  actual  ones  as 
little  as  the  would-be  "Russian"  attire,  worn  by  some 
Slavophils  and  mistaken  by  their  own  peasants  for 
Tartar  or  Persian,  resembled  the  ancient  Russian  dress. 

In  such  spiritualized  form  Russian  traditional 
"ideas"  were  destined  to  play  their  part  in  the  last  and 
most  perfect  stage  of  universal  history.  Russia  was 
to  say  the  "last  word"  in  the  development  of  man- 
kind. Thus,  Russian  nationalism  became  messianic, 
just  as  its  Polish  counterpart  was  at  this  very  time, 
about  half  a  century  ago. 

I  am  not  here  to  confront  the  Slavophil  theory  with 
the  real  facts  of  Russian  history  and  the  actualities  of 
Russian  politics.  We  have  only  to  follow  the  further, 
purely  theoretical,  development  of  Slavophilism  in 
order  to  see  how  soon  the  dififerent  elements  out  of 
which  the  theory  was  formed  became  antiquated. 

First,  the  metaphysical,  the  Hegelian,  elements  of 
the  scheme  were  forsaken.  The  "fundamental  idea" 
of  the  whole  plan  was  the  notion  of  a  single  thread 
of  universal  history,  consisting  in  a  series  of  select  and 
privileged  nations  that  came  each  in  its  turn  to  the 
fore.  This  idea  completely  lost  its  value  in  the  next 
generation.  Under  the  growing  influence  of  natural 
sciences,  an  opposite  idea  was  generally  accepted. 
Every  phenomenon  had  now  to  be  explained  by  its  own 
motive  forces,  not  by  final  causes  lying  outside  of  it. 
Hence  every  nation  was  expected  to  live  its  own 
national  life,  not  that  of  mankind.  Thus  the  very  idea 
of  a  universal  history  of  nations  was  thrown  aside. 
When  later  it  was  resumed  by  sociology,  it  was  entirely 


S8  RUSSIA  AND  ITS  CRISIS 

purified  of  its  teleological  meaning.  Then  a  practical 
consideration  presented  itself.  A  theory  that  approved 
of  certain  national  qualities  only  so  far  as  they  suited 
the  general  development  of  mankind  was  surely  not 
nationalistic  enough.  Such  qualities  were  found  to  be 
rather  too  cosmopolitan.  And  if  the  most  important 
of  these  qualities  for  a  Russian  was  to  be  an  orthodox 
member  of  the  eastern  church,  the  further  question 
arose:  Was  the  Greek  church  exclusively  Russian? 
And,  moreover,  did  Russian  people  possess  this  quality 
at  least  in  such  a  measure  as  would  be  sufficient  to 
enable  them  to  play  the  missionary  part  which  was 
theirs  in  the  drama  of  universal  history?  Thus  in  the 
second  half  of  the  nineteenth  century  a  new  current  of 
nationalistic  thought  appeared.  It  was  now  the  im- 
pending task  to  find  out  something  more  peculiar, 
more  fitting  to  characterize  the  Russian  nation  in  par- 
ticular, even  though  it  should  be  not  at  all  universal 
and  messianic.  This  particularizing  tendency  fully 
prevailed,  when  national  feeling  was  roused  by  im- 
portant events  of  history :  by  European  coalition 
against  Russia  during  the  Crimean  War  (1853-56), 
and  by  the  Polish  rebellion  ( 1863),  enjoying  the  moral 
support  of  western  public  opinion. 

The  new  nationalistic  current  found  its  outlet  in 
Danilevsky's  book  on  Russia  and  Europe,  which  started 
from  the  idea  of  their  irreconcilable  opposition.  Fac- 
ing the  supposed  fact  of  this  opposition,  the  book  in- 
cluded an  entirely  new  reconstruction  of  the  Slavophil 
theory;  and  it  has  remained  until  now  the  generally 
acknowledged  gospel  of  the  nationalistic  creed  in  Rus- 
sia.   Let  us  see  what  changes  the  old  theory  has  under- 


THE  NATIONALISTIC  IDEA  59 

gone.  According  to  Danilevsky's  theory,  Europe  can- 
not help  hating  Russia.  The  reason  is  that  their  "  na- 
tional types  "  are  as  different  and  as  incapable  of  being 
reduced  to  one  as  zoological  species.  You  see  by  this 
that  Danilevsky  takes  his  arguments  from  natural  his- 
tory ;  it  was  not  in  vain  that  he  was  living  and  writing 
(1860-70)  when  natural  sciences  were  in  their  ascend- 
ancy in  Russia.  But  Danilevsky  has  not  yielded  to  the 
general  drift  of  science.  He  is  anti-Darwinian,  and  he 
does  not  acknowledge  the  common  descent  of  species; 
he  prefers  to  think  that  the  zoological  species  were  all 
preformed  by  God's  will  and  thus  unchangeable.  The 
same  he  affirms  to  be  the  case  with  national  types. 
Thus  the  national  types  are  exclusive  and  absolutely 
particular ;  no  transmission  of  culture  is  possible  from 
one  to  another.  Fish  cannot  be  made  to  breathe  with 
lungs;  and  just  so  Russia  cannot  have  European  insti- 
tutions. Accordingly,  Russia  has  to  live  only  on  what 
the  Slavic  "type  of  culture"  has  had  in  itself,  since 
the  beginning  of  its  existence.  Hence  the  only  his- 
torical mission  Russia  has  to  accomplish  is  to  make 
free  the  Slavs  of  Turkey  and  to  unify  all  Slavs  under 
its  sway,  choosing  Constantinople  for  the  center  of 
this  federation  of  Slavs. 

Now,  "who  says  A,  must  say  B,"  as  the  German 
saying  goes.  Danilevsky  stopped  too  soon  in  drawing 
consequences  from  his  premises.  His  followers  went 
farther.  Danilevsky  had  opposed  the  Slavic  type  to 
the  European.  With  the  same  right  the  Russian  type 
could  be  opposed  to  the  Slavic.  Experience  proved 
just  then  that  Slavs  did  not  wish  to  be  related  to  the 
same  "type  of  culture"  as  the  Russian  people.     The 


6o  RUSSIA  AND  ITS  CRISIS 

liberated  Slavic  nations  of  the  Balkans  were  irrevo- 
cably driven  away  by  the  European  whirlwind  of  cul- 
ture. The  Poles  wanted  to  be  liberated  from,  not  by, 
Russia.  Under  these  circumstances  the  puerility  of 
Danilevsky's  scheme  of  a  Slavic  federation  under  Rus- 
sian leadership  became  completely  manifest. 

There  came  then  Mr.  Leontiev,  a  Russian  consul 
in  the  near  East,  who  declared  that  Slavs  were  entirely 
lost  to  Russian  culture  in  consequence  of  European 
contagion.     But  then,  were  Russian  people  themselves 
quite  free  from  the  same  contagion  of  "liberty  and 
equality"  ?    Those  who  opposed  the  Russian  people  to 
the  emancipated  Slavs  were  bound  to  oppose,  among 
the  Russian  people  themselves,  those  social  layers  that 
were  still  preserving  the  old  national  type  of  culture  to 
such  as  had  been  torn  off  from  the  old  stock  by  Euro- 
pean civilization.     There  existed  a  literary  group  in 
Moscow — Apollon  Grigoryev,  Tertius  Filippov,  and 
others — who  professed  that  the  genuine  type  of  Rus- 
sian culture  was  to  be  found  only  among  Great  Rus- 
sians   (to  the  exclusion  of  the  Little  Russians  and 
White  Russians — two  other  branches  of  the  Russian 
speech)  ;   and  in  the  midst  of  the  Great  Russians  they 
found  their  favorite  type  only  among  the  inhabitants 
of  Moscow ;   and  even  in  Moscow  the  type  was  thriv- 
ing nowhere  but  in  the  old  merchants'  quarter  on  the 
other  side  of  the  Moskva  River,  where  the  best  Rus- 
sian songs  and  the  oddest  Russian  customs  were  still 
preserved    free    from    European    "progress."      The 
friends  had  regular  gatherings  in  a  Moscow  tavern, 
"  Britannia,"  in  order  to  sing  the  songs  and  to  discuss 
the  admirable  old  habits.    Now,  this  looked  very  much 
like  Mr.   Pickwick's  researches. 


THE  NATIONALISTIC  IDEA  6i 

And  yet  this  was  not  all.  The  Moscovite  Pick- 
wickians  found  very  little  of  their  genuine  Russian 
type,  but  it  was  much  more  than  Leontiev  could  find. 
Indeed,  he  found  no  elements  of  culture  in  the  "Rus- 
sian type."  The  church  and  the  state  he  declared  to  be 
Byzantine,  not  Russian.  Genuine  culture  in  the  com- 
mon folk  he  found  to  be  nil.  And  last,  the  very  idea 
of  nationality  he  discovered  to  be  of  revolutionary  and 
European  origin!  He  concluded  from  all  this  that 
"Russian  originality  did  not  consist  in  a  creation  of 
the  new,  but  in  the  preservation  of  the  old."  Accord- 
ingly, he  gave  the  good  advice  to  concentrate  all  the 
state  wisdom  on  one  thing:  namely,  to  "freeze  out" 
every  new  force,  every  element  of  progress,  which 
should  bud  under  the  surface  of  Russian  Byzantinism. 
Only  this  heroic  cure  could  prevent  decay.  The  best 
model  of  such  a  treatment  Mr.  Leontiev  found  to  be 
the  Turkish  rule  of  the  Christian  rayah.  This  same 
policy  was  to  be  used  by  the  Russian  autocracy,  in 
order  that  the  barbarism  of  the  Russian  people  might 
be  preserved  in  its  entire  "originality"  from  every 
contact  with  any  civilizing  influence  except  that  of 
"Byzantine  principles"  in  church  and  state. 

Such  was  the  last  word  of  the  nationalistic  theory, 
and  such  it  ought  to  be,  if  the  theory  was  to  be  con- 
sistent and  sincere  in  drawing  conclusions  from  its 
original  assertions.  We  must  add  that  such  also  was 
the  real  sense  of  the  actual  policy  of  the  Russian  gov- 
ernment during  the  last  thirty  years.  Take,  as  an  illus- 
tration, the  writings  of  Mr.  Pobedonostsev,  the  man 
of  reaction  in  Russia  of  the  present  day.  You  will  find 
there  nothing  but  Mr.  Leontiev's  program  of  policy. 


62  RUSSIA  AND  ITS  CRISIS 

Nothing  is  to  be  created  anew ;  nothing  that  is  original 
and  positive  is  even  to  be  expected  to  come  from  the 
"soul"  of  the  nation.  The  only  aim  is  to  preserve  as 
long  as  possible  the  Byzantine  state  and  the  Byzantine 
church,  the  autocracy  and  the  orthodoxy.  Political 
freedom  in  the  whole  civilized  world  Mr.  Pobedonost- 
sev  proclaims  a  failure.  Freedom  of  thought  and 
opinion  he  thinks  a  humbug,  a  sham  employed  by  the 
rich  and  cunning.  Freedom  of  belief  he  declares  sheer 
nonsense.  And  all  these  he  finds  to  be  in  flagrant 
opposition  to  national  ideals,  which,  however,  nobody 
knows  how  to  read  aright. 

This  series  of  exclusively  negative  assertions  were 
perhaps  better  as  a  reactionary  program  than  as  a 
national  theory.     For  a  living  nation,  believing  in  its 
future,  it  was  simply  an  insult.     It  was  to  be  expected 
that   even   among  the   nationalistic   party   somebody 
would  arise  who  would  try  to  find  a  way  of  escape  from 
the  deadlock  of  reactionary  nationalism.     There  came 
now  Mr.  Solovyov,  the  theologian  and  philosopher  of 
a  mystic  stamp.    He  reminded  his  party  that  national- 
ism is  not  necessarily  reactionary.     He  tried  to  recall 
to  their  memory  the  fact  that  cosmopolitan  elements 
alone  were  to  help  the  Russian  people  to  their  historical 
predestination,  according  to  the  prevailing  idea  in  the 
original   Slavophil   doctrine.      Cosmopolitan   elements 
in  a  national  type — this  was  to  be  its  religion.     Now, 
Russian  religion  ought  not  to  be  thought  of  as  fatally 
lacking  cosmopolitan  elements.    True  Christianity,  Mr. 
Solovyov  asserted,  was  identical  with  human  progress, 
not  opposed  to  it.     There  exist  no  contradictions  be- 
tween modern  ideas  and  Christianity.     Thus  Russia 


THE  NATIONALISTIC  IDEA  63 

was  to  share  in  the  general  progress  of  mankind  with- 
out disclaiming  its  religion,  but  only  by  embracing 
in  it  a  deeper  and  larger  sense.  The  Russian  religion 
was  narrow-minded,  because  the  rights  of  the  church 
were  appropriated  by  the  state;  such  was  the  Byzan- 
tine form  of  religion,  borrowed  by  Russia.  But  Rus- 
sia had  only  to  disown  this,  and  to  unite  with  the  only 
really  universal  form  of  Christian  faith,  the  Roman 
Catholic  church.  This  universal  creed  was  to  be  car- 
ried through  with  the  aid  of  the  most  powerful  ruler 
on  the  earth.  Thus  the  medicxval  idea  of  an  only 
church,  attended  by  an  only  empire,  was  to  be  resus- 
citated and  realized.  Pope  and  Tsar  allied,  with  the 
prophet  of  their  union  between  them ;  such  was  Solov- 
yov's  apocalyptical  vision.  You  see  that  even  here  the 
share  of  the  Tsar  and  of  the  Russian  people  was  ma- 
terial power  alone;  the  moral  strength  of  the  alliance 
was  to  be  the  pope's.  Thus  even  in  Solovyov's  cosmo- 
politan theory  of  nationalism  the  only  part  of  Russia 
was  that  of  self-resignation. 

With  this,  every  possibility  of  a  nationalistic  issue 
had  been  tried  and  found  wanting.  Solovyov's  bold 
entanglement  of  ideas  served  only  to  complete  and  to 
close  the  series  of  possible  nationalistic  schemes. 

While  studying  thus  the  development  of  the  nation- 
alistic idea,  we  have  gained  some  insight  into  what 
has  been  supposed  to  be  Russian  historical  tradition. 
It  consisted,  we  found,  in  a  peculiar  "spirit  of  the 
nation,"  embodied  in  certain  religious  and  political 
institutions.  Now,  as  far  as  regards  the  national 
"spirit,"  we  have  nothing  to  add  to  what  has  been 
said  about  the  Russian  psychological  type  in  our  first 


64  RUSSIA  AND  ITS  CRISIS 

lecture.  But  a  larger  treatment  is  needed  in  so  far 
as  the  peculiar  forms  of  the  Russian  church  and  state 
are  brought  into  consideration.  What  was  really  the 
religious  and  political  tradition  bequeathed  by  ancient 
Russia  to  modern  Russia?  What  were  the  civilizing 
elements  of  that  tradition?  Were  there  any  such  ele- 
ments at  all?  Was  this  tradition  continuous  and  in- 
herited by  many,  or  was  it  rather  artificially  revived 
and  shared  only  by  few  ?  These  questions,  by  the  help 
of  historical  evidence,  we  shall  now  try  to  answer. 


CHAPTER    III 

THE    RELIGIOUS   TRADITION 

Those  of  you  who  have  read  the  Lectures  on  the 
History  of  the  Eastern  Church,  by  Dean  Stanley  of 
Westminster,  may  remember  his  splendid  pages  on  the 
general  characteristics  of  the  eastern  church.  The 
author  was  influenced  in  some  measure  by  the  Rus- 
sian Slavophils,  particularly  by  Homyakov.  And  the 
Slavophils,  in  their  turn,  were  influenced  by  the  Ger- 
man historians  of  religion.  Thus  the  view  Dean  Stan- 
ley takes  of  the  subject  is  by  no  means  personal;  it  is 
rather  characteristic  of  many  generations  of  scholars 
and  general  readers.    As  he  rightly  observes : 

The  distinction  which  has  been  most  frequently  remarked 
[between  the  eastern  and  the  western  churches]  is  the  speculative 
tendency  of  the  oriental  and  the  practical  tendency  of  the  western. 
"The  East,"  says  Dean  Milman,  "enacted  creeds,  the  West  dis- 
cipline." The  first  decree  of  the  Eastern  Council  determined 
the  relations  of  the  Godhead.  The  first  decree  of  the  Pope  of 
Rome  interdicted  the  marriage  of  the  clergy.  All  the  first 
founders  of  theology  were  easterns.  Latin  Christianity  con- 
templated with  almost  equal  indifference  Nestorianism  and  all 
its  prolific  race,  Eutychianism,  Monophysitism,  Monothelitism. 
Probably  no  Latin  Christian  ever  felt  himself  agitated  even  in 
the  least  degree  by  any  one  of  the  seventy  opinions  on  the 
union  of  the  two  natures  which  are  said  to  perplex  the  church  of 
Abyssinia.  This  fundamental  contrast  naturally  widens  into 
other  cognate  differences.  The  western  theology  is  essentially 
logical  in  form  and  is  based  on  law.  The  eastern  is  rhetorical  in 
form  and  based  on  philosophy.  The  Latin  divine  succeeded  the 
Roman    advocate.      The   oriental    divine    succeeded    the    Grecian 

65 


66  RUSSIA  AND  ITS  CRISIS 

sophist.  The  subtleties  of  Roman  law  as  appUed  to  the  rela- 
tions of  God  and  man  are  almost  unknown  to  the  East. 
"Forensic  justiftcation,"  "merit,"  "demerit,"  "satisfaction,"  "im- 
puted righteousness,"  "decrees,"  represent  ideas  which  in  the 
Eastern  theology  have  no  predominant  influence— hardly  any 
words  to  render  them. 

And,  on  the  other  hand. 

The  Latin  language  was  inadequate  to  express  minute  shades 
of  meaning  for  which  the  Greek  is  admirably  fitted.  The 
Athanasian  creed  by  the  evident  strain  of  its  sentences  reveals 
the  ineffectual  labor  of  the  Latin  phrases,  "persona"  and  "sub- 
stantia," to  represent  the  correlative  but  hardly  corresponding 
words  by  which  the  Greeks,  with  a  natural  facility,  expressed 
"the  hypostatic  union." 

All  these  fine  observations  we  may  agree  with. 
But  we  must  be  aware  that  the  subtleties  of  philosophy 
and  the  subtleties  of  law  which  mark  the  difference 
between  the  eastern  and  the  w^estern  theology  have  no 
connection  whatever  with  the  Russian  church.  In  Rus- 
sia the  Orthodox  church  was  incapable  of  any  subtle- 
ties and  possessed  no  theology  of  her  own.  Thus,  such 
characteristics  of  the  eastern  church  as  we  have  just 
quoted  from  Dean  Stanley's  book  ought  not  to  be  mis- 
taken for  the  characteristics  of  the  church  of  Russia. 
The  age  of  refined  theological  heresies,  engrafted  on 
ancient  philosophical  systems,  had  long  passed  by  be- 
fore the  oriental  doctrine  was  spread  among  the  north- 
ern barbarians.  To  take  a  share  in  working  out  the 
teachings  of  religion  was  for  them  chronologically  im- 
possible. The  doctrine  of  faith  was  handed  over  to 
Russia  in  the  form  definitely  given  by  the  Seven  Ecu- 
menical Councils.  No  further  development  was  to  be 
tolerated.    Thus,  when  Russians  first  embraced  Chris- 


THE  RELIGIOUS  TRADITION  67 

tianity,  the  doctrine  had  already  become  stationary. 
And  for  this  reason  the  oriental  doctrine  preserved 
many  an  archaic  feature  of  primitive  Christianity; 
such,  for  instance,  as  the  undeveloped  and  unspi ritual- 
ized form  of  the  sacraments,  the  close  relation  between 
clergy  and  laity,  the  principle  of  electing  the  former  by 
the  latter,  the  divine  service  in  the  vernacular,  the 
unsystematized  theology  and  uncentralized  hierarchy. 
To  perpetuate  all  these  traits  of  stagnation  north  of  the 
Euxine  proved  easier  than  it  would  have  been  to  trans- 
plant to  Russia  the  taste  for  refined  dogmatical  con- 
troversies. The  Russian  church  is  not  speculative 
like  the  oriental  churches  of  the  first  centuries  after 
Christ.  But  it  is  oriental  in  its  other  aspects,  being 
old-fashioned  in  ritual  and  stationary  in  dogma. 

This,  however,  is  not  sufficient  to  give  an  adequate 
idea  of  the  Russian  form  of  eastern  orthodoxy.  Rus- 
sia was  not  only  unable  to  develop  any  further  the 
religious  idea  which  she  had  received,  but  she  was  not 
even  able  to  preserve  it  in  its  oriental  shape  unchanged. 
She  necessarily  adapted  very  easily  and  involuntarily 
the  oriental  dogma  to  her  former  pagan  creed.  She 
attained  this  result  by  dint  of  simplifying  the  eastern 
Christianity  and  reducing  it  to  a  state  of  complete 
materialization.  Simplified  and  materialized,  the  ori- 
ental creed  has  become  a  particular  and  national  type 
of  Russian  orthodoxy. 

Of  course,  this  would  not  be  done  all  at  once.  Cen- 
turies passed  before  even  this  most  imperfect  kind  of 
religion  was  worked  out.  The  bulk  of  the  common 
people  remained  entirely  pagan  and  wholly  unac- 
quainted with  even  the  rites  of  the  Christian  faith,  not 


68  RUSSIA  AND  ITS  CRISIS 

to  Speak  of  the  sense — nay,  even  of  the  letter — of  their 
new  creed.  When  a  foreign  traveler  asked  a  Russian 
peasant,  as  late  as  the  seventeenth  century,  why  people 
should  not  know  either  the  Lord's  Prayer  or  the  Ave 
Maria,  he  was  ansv^^ered  that  this  was  a  superior  knowl- 
edge, which  did  not  at  all  suit  the  simple  peasants,  but 
only  Tsars  and  the  patriarch,  and  in  general  the  lords 
and  the  clergy  who  had  no  work  to  do.  Thus  people 
did  not  know  the  Christian  doctrine  at  all,  and  they 
acknowledged  the  Christian  clergy  only  as  a  substitute 
for  the  pagan  one.  The  parson  had  to  perform  the 
same  duty  as  the  pagan  priest ;  like  a  shaman,  or  popu- 
lar wizard,  he  was  asked  to  expel  the  evil  spirits  from 
houses  and  from  fields,  by  magic  rites  and  sqjemn 
incantations.  And  the  clergy  acquiesced  in  this;  the 
village  priests  of  today  still  do  so  in  times  of  droughts 
and  disease,  just  as  the  bishop  of  the  first  popular 
monastery  in  Keeyev,  Tlieodosius  of  Pechersk,  had 
done  in  the  eleventh  century. 

The  old  pagan  gods  had  now  turned  to  demons; 
the  Christian  gods,  the  saints,  were  there  to  take  their 
place.  A  popular  writer  of  the  beginning  of  the 
eighteenth  century,  Pososhkov,  complained  that  com- 
mon people  bowed  before  the  image  of  God  only  from 
the  waist;  while  before  St.  Nicholas,  the  beloved 
saint,  they  bowed  down  to  the  floor.  Before  the  im- 
age of  St.  Nicholas  there  were  always  plenty  of  tapers 
lit  in  his  honor  or  proffered  as  an  offering ;  while  be- 
fore the  Lord  our  Savior  there  were  none.  Every 
saint  was  supposed  to  cure  a  particular  disease  and 
to  be  able  to  insure  a  special  sort  of  benefit.  But  this 
was  not  yet  sufficient.    Everybody  had  his  own  particu- 


THE  RELIGIOUS  TRADITION  69 

lar  family  saint.  Instead  of  listening  to  the  divine 
service  when  in  church,  everybody  preferred  to  wor- 
ship his  own  particular  god.  People  brought  their 
family  images  with  them  to  church,  set  them  up- 
right in  any  place  they  chose,  and  bowed  and  prayed 
to  them,  not  attending  to  the  general  prayers.  If  they 
chanced  to  be  deprived  temporarily  of  the  Holy  Com- 
munion, their  particular  image  ("icon")  was  sent 
away  with  them  from  the  church.  Generally  they  did 
not  realize  that  a  Deity  existed  somewhere  beyond  and 
independent  of  their  fetich.  But  even  if  they  were 
directed  by  their  spiritual  leaders  to  heaven  as  the  seat 
of  a  higher  Deity,  they  did  not  need  much  mental  exer- 
tion to  grasp  this  new  idea;  the  popular  theologians 
themselves  thought  God  and  the  saints  abode  materi- 
ally in  heaven,  just  as  they  saw  them  represented  on 
their  icons.  The  angels  had  wings,  and  their  hair  was 
bound  by  narrow  bands  that  floated  in  the  wind ;  and 
they  were  supposed  to  hold  the  little  mirrors  that  they 
held  in  their  hands  on  the  images.  The  Holy  Trinity, 
acording  to  popular  theology,  "sat  in  a  row  in  heaven, 
upon  separate  thrones,  just  like  a  father  w^ith  his  sons : 
God,  the  Father,  in  the  middle,  the  Son  on  his  right, 
the  Holy  Spirit  on  the  left;  and  Christ  sat  there  also, 
as  a  fourth  person,  on  a  special  throne  before  God,  the 
Father."  Then  the  question  would  arise  in  more 
speculative  minds:  How  could  these  Gods  leave  their 
place  to  visit  this  world  and  still  remain  in  heaven? 
Popular  theologians  foresaw  and  wisely  resolved  this 
embarrassing  problem.  The  Holy  Spirit  went  down 
only  to  pour  out  his  gifts  upon  the  apostles;  having 
done  this,  he  returned — or  perhaps  he  did  not  move 


70  RUSSIA  AND  ITS  CRISIS 

at  all,  and  only  sent  the  grace  down.  Well  now,  but 
how  could  Christ  be  born  on  the  earth  from  a  virgin  ? 
Why,  Christ  certainly  came  into  his  mother  through 
the  ear ! 

Such  was  the  sort  of  theology  that  Russian  people 
had  got  after  many  centuries  of  Christian  existence. 
These  were,  however,  the  opinions  of  the  enlightened ; 
the  bulk  of  the  nation  was  not  even  as  far  advanced  3S 
this.  In  Mr.  Wallace's  Russia  you  may  find  an  anec- 
dote about  a  peasant  who  was  asked  by  a  priest  to 
name  the  three  persons  of  the  Trinity,  and  who  imme- 
diately answered :  "Why,  of  course,  they  are  the 
Savior,  the  mother  of  God,  and  Saint  Nicholas,  the 
miracle-worker." 

Religion  being  considered,  not  as  an  inner  state  of 
the  soul,  but  as  a  formal  contract  for  salvation  between 
man  and  God,  the  whole  scheme  of  salvation  was 
worked  out  accordingly.  "Do  ut  des" — 'T  give  to  you 
— in  order  that  you  should  give  to  me" — such  was  the 
meaning  of  the  contract,  which  left  no  place  to  the 
action  of  "grace"  and  reduced  the  "works"  to  their 
outward  expression  alone.  Prayer  was  not  an  inner 
concentration  of  thought  and  feeling  on  religion;  it 
consisted  in  crossing  and  bowing,  in  kneeling  and  in 
lighting  tapers  before  the  holy  image,  in  order  that 
the  saint  might  grant  whatever  was  asked  of  him,  no 
matter  whether  it  was  good  crops  or  success  in  a 
scheme  of  robbery.  Popular  theologians  tried  to  intro- 
duce some  amendments  here  also,  but  they  could  not 
soar  too  high  above  the  average  thought  and  feeling. 
They  ventured  to  give  advice  as  to  the  best  magic 
formula   for  prayer;    they  recommended  as  best  the 


THE  RELIGIOUS  TRADITION  71 

short,  "Jesus  Christ,  Iiave  mercy  on  us" — the  mediaeval 
Kyrie  eleison.  They  knew  no  other  means  for  con- 
centration of  rehgious  thoughts  on  prayer  than  the 
continual  repetition  of  this  formula.  Not  relying  on 
any  inner  religious  motive,  they  enforced  their  precepts 
by  frightening  the  people  with  familiar  notions  of 
heathen  times.  The  demons  and  the  evil  spirits  were 
lurking  about — the  air  was  full  of  them;  if  prayer 
were  interrupted  by  secular  thoughts,  this  opened  a 
"  chink "  into  the  very  soul,  and  demons  entered  it 
immediately.  Was  the  prayer  inattentively  said,  the 
demon  intercepted  it  and  dispersed  it  in  the  air,  so  that 
God,  or  his  saint,  could  not  listen  to  it.  It  was  only 
when  properly  delivered  that  the  prayer  dashed  through 
the  air  up  to  the  very  throne. 

In  this  kind  of  religion  personal  salvation  was 
everything;  social  action,  nothing.  Of  course,  works 
of  charity  were  to  be  practiced;  but  there  remained 
in  fact  little  real  charity  in  these  works.  "The  old 
Russian  benefactor,"  a  Moscow  professor  says,  "did 
not  so  much  intend  to  raise  by  his  good  work  the 
standard  of  the  general  social  welfare  as  to  attain  in  a 
higher  degree  to  his  own  moral  perfection.  Hence 
pauperism  was  not  dealt  with  in  ancient  Russia  as 
an  economical  evil,  as  a  plague  of  the  social  order,  but 
rather  as  a  practical  institution  for  moral  education." 
In  short,  charity  did  not  exist  because  there  were  poor 
and  downtrodden  people;  but  the  poor  and  down- 
trodden people  existed  in  order  that  charity  might  be 
practiced.  It  was  a  part  of  the  divine  order  of  things; 
therefore  pauperism  was  not  to  be  destroyed  or  even 
alleviated,  but  simply  to  be  used  for  the  soul's  salvation. 


72  RUSSIA  AND  ITS  CRISIS 

It  was  a  kind  of  Eternal  Life  Insurance  Company. 
What  sort  of  benevolent  feelings  this  "institution" 
contrived  to  produce  may  be  seen  from  the  Christian 
advice  of  the  popular  theologian,  Pososhkov,  quoted 
before : 

When  drinking  exquisite  liquors,  recall  to  your  mind  such 
paupers  as  do  not  possess  even  pure  water,  but  are  obliged  to 
drink  muddy  water  and  to  draw  it  from  a  swamp,  mixed  with 
flies  and  worms.  When  partaking  of  greasy  and  sweet  meals 
[this  was  the  kind  of  gastronomy  Russian  people  relished] 
recollect  the  poor,  who  do  not  get  even  pure  bread,  but  rotten 
bread  baked  with  chaff.  And  then  consider  how  God  has 
replenished  you  and  supplied  you  with  such  abundance,  while 
other  people,  who  are  quite  like  you,  suffer.  And  having 
brought  to  remembrance  these  sufferings,  render  thanks  to  God 
because  of  such  an  abundance  as  yours. 

To  sum  up  the  spirit  of  practical  work  in  this 
religion,  we  have  only  to  refer  again  to  the  words  of 
the  same  Pososhkov : 

Take  care  that  you  surpass  the  scribes  and  Pharisees  by  your 
virtues,  in  order  that  you  may  enter  into  the  realm  of  heaven. 
Therefore  you  must,  after  having  given  to  God  the  tenth  of  your 
substance,  add  to  it  something — about  5  per  cent,  of  it.  The 
Pharisee  fasted  twice  a  week;  but  besides  this  you  must  fast 
the  whole  four  fasts  of  the  year,  established  by  the  holy  fathers. 
Thus  you  will  be  superior  to  the  Pharisees. 

But  enough  of  these  quotations.  Russian  religion, 
as  we  see  now,  had  ceased  to  be  entirely  heathen,  with- 
out becoming  entirely  Christian.  By  degrees  it  became 
the  national  religion  of  Saint  Russia,  as  foreign 
travelers  learned  to  know  it  as  early  as  the  seventeenth 
century.  It  was  the  religion  of  a  continuous  ringing 
of  bells,  innumerable  bowings  and  crossings  before 
icons,   long   fasts,    and   interminable   divine   services, 


THE  RELIGIOUS  TRADITION  73 

which  brought  consternation  even  to  the  Christians 
of  the  eastern  ritual  who  happened  to  come  to  Moscow 
in  order  to  get  the  ordinary  tsarish  ahns  for  oriental 
monasteries  and  bishops. 

But  in  their  turn  Russian  people,  as  they  became 
aware  of  the  difference  between  their  own  national  reli- 
gion and  that  of  the  eastern  divines,  began  to  won- 
der which  was  the  genuine  and  original  one.  And 
they  came  to  the  expected  conclusion :  they  exalted 
their  national  religion,  and  repudiated  the  oriental. 
The  consequences  of  this  distinction  and  comparative 
evaluation  of  the  oriental  and  the  national  Russian 
churches  were  so  important  that  we  must  dwell  on 
them  longer. 

Russia  received  her  Christianity,  as  is  well  known, 
from  the  Greeks  of  Constantinople.  But  there  existed 
an  antagonism  between  the  Russians  and  the  Greeks; 
and  it  was  perhaps  as  old  as  the  time  of  the  conversion 
of  Russia.  All  bishops  in  Russia  were  Greeks  or 
orientals  until  the  epoch  of  the  Tartar  conquest  in 
the  thirteenth  century.  Many  of  the  simple  priests 
were  also  at  first  easterners.  Through  them  the  Rus- 
sian church  kept  in  close  relation  with  her  Byzantine 
metropolis.  She  was  under  the  direct  rule  of  the 
Constantinopolitan  patriarch  and  under  the  control  of 
the  Byzantine  emperor.  The  oriental  divines  were  as  a 
rule  not  much  interested  in  taking  spiritual  care  of 
their  flock.  In  ancient  Russia  they  were  what  they 
are  even  now  in  remote  corners  of  Turkey,  where 
they  still  go  on  collecting  their  tithes  from  the  Slavic 
population,  who  hate  them  for  their  avidity  and  ar- 
rogance.   The  difference  in  culture,  then,  was  equally 


74  RUSSIA  AND  ITS  CRISIS 

great  between  the  sheep  and  the  shepherds.  A  Greek 
bishop,  and  even  an  ordinary  priest,  considered  him- 
self the  bearer  of  a  higher  and  more  refined  culture 
among  the  barbarians,  the  "sheep-skins" — a  culture 
which  they  were  not  able  to  understand,  still  less  to 
adopt.  As  a  rule,  these  eastern  divines  did  not  know, 
and  rarely  tried  to  learn,  the  language  of  the  natives. 
In  their  turn  the  people  did  not  trust  them,  and  longed 
to  get  divines  of  their  own  kith  and  kin.  As  long  as 
the  patriarch  of  Constantinople  could  hinder  this,  he 
did  so.  But  then  hard  times  came  for  Constantinople, 
too.  The  same  Asiatic  wave  which  brought  Tartars  to 
southern  Russia  brought  their  kinsmen,  the  Turks, 
to  Asia  Minor;  Constantinople  was  frightened  at  the 
approaching  danger  at  the  same  time  as  the  Russian 
Keeyev.  The  fourth  crusade  was  organized  for  Con- 
stantinople's defense ;  and  with  the  arrival  of  the 
crusaders  (1204-61)  began  the  troubled  period,  which 
ended  only  with  the  final  conquest  of  Constantinople 
by  the  Turks,  two  centuries  later  ( 1453).  The  Greeks 
had  to  look  for  allies  to  the  west,  not  to  the  east ;  and 
these  were  to  be  bought  by  promises  of  a  religious 
union.  During  this  time  the  Russian  church  was  left 
to  herself;  she  was  just  then  working  out  her  national 
type  of  religion.  Profiting  by  the  distress  of  Con- 
stantinople, Russia  presently  appropriated  the  long- 
contested  right  of  the  ordination  of  bishops,  and  tried 
to  get  rid  of  the  right  which  still  remained  to  the 
patriarch  —  of  confirming  the  elections  made  by  the 
council  of  the  Russian  bishops.  At  this  moment  Con- 
stantinople fell  under  Mahomet  II. 's  arms. 

The  news  of  the  fall  produced  a  very  deep  impres- 


THE  RELIGIOUS  TRADITION  75 

sion  in  Russia.  Surely  it  was  God's  punishment :  Con- 
stantinople had  just  accepted  the  union  with  the  Roman 
Catholic  church  (1439,  "^  Florence).  "Thencefor- 
ward," as  the  Great  Prince  of  Muscovy  wrote  to  the 
Byzantine  emperor,  "we  began  to  be  on  our  guard 
concerning  our  Orthodoxy,  and  our  immortal  souls, 
and  to  remember  the  hour  of  death  and  our  respon- 
sibility before  the  Judge  of  secret  thoughts,  at  the  last 
judgment."  The  responsibility  was  great,  indeed,  in 
the  eyes  of  the  Muscovite  people :  they  had  to  assume 
the  legacy  of  the  fallen  empire,  and  see  to  the  con- 
tinuity of  the  church  and  apostolical  succession  to  the 
end  of  time,  since  there  was  no  other  independent 
Orthodox  church  in  the  whole  world.  The  theory 
that  Moscow  was  the  third  Rome  originated  in  these 
days,  in  order  to  formulate  the  new  idea  of  the  uni- 
versal mission  of  the  Russian  national  church.  A 
learned  monk,  Philotheus,  wrote  to  John  III.,  the  Mus- 
covite prince : 

The  church  of  ancient  Rome  was  destroyed  in  consequence 
of  the  heresy  of  Apollinarius,  and  the  Constantinopolitan  church 
of  the  second  Rome  was  cut  to  pieces  by  the  axes  of  Hagar's 
posterity.  But  this  Holy  Apostolic  church  of  the  third  Rome 
— to  wit,  of  thy  autocratic  power — shines  more  brightly  than  the 
sun  in  the  whole  universe.  Look  here  now  and  listen,  Oh  thou 
pious  Tsar:  Christian  realms  have  all  converged  into  thine,  the 
only  one ;  two  Romes  have  fallen ;  the  third  stands  upright,  and 
there  is  no  fourth  to  come;  thou  art  the  only  Tsar  of  the 
Christians  in  the  entire  world;  thy  Christian  sway  shall  never 
yield   to   anybody. 

Now,  were  Russian  spiritual  resources  equal  to  this 
new  task?  Was  the  Russian  church  worthy  of  her 
universal  mission  ?    The  very  character  of  the  mission 


76  RUSSIA  AND  ITS  CRISIS 

gave  the  answer.  There  was  nothing  to  create;  just 
because  they  strove  for  new  things,  two  Romes  had 
perished.  Russia  had  only  to  preserve  her  spiritual 
wealth  untouched  unto  the  day  of  judgment.  But,  in 
order  to  preserve  it,  she  ought  to  know  what  that 
wealth  was.  The  first  and  the  only  task  now  to  be 
fulfilled  was  the  collection  and  the  examination  of  all 
the  elements  of  the  national  sanctity. 

Let  us  recall  here  what  has  been  said  above  about 
the  national  type  of  the  Russian  creed.  This  creed  had 
become  closely  connected  with  outward  rituals  con- 
siderably different  from  Greek  religious  practice.  And, 
from  the  new  point  of  view,  this  was  just  what  was 
wanted.  Russian  faith  was  unlike,  because  the  Greeks 
had  betrayed  their  tradition  and  their  antiquity.  This 
faith  had  to  be  kept  as  the  only  genuine  relic  of  Chris- 
tianity in  the  world.  To  preserve  it  from  all  change 
was  the  universal  mission  of  Russia.  Having  this  in 
mind,  Russian  theologians  began  systematically  to 
search  for  differences  between  the  Greek  and  the  Rus- 
sian ritual.  And  such  differences  as  they  found  they 
at  once  explained  by  this  or  that  failure  of  the  Greeks 
in  doctrine.  The  Greek  church,  for  instance,  did  not 
hold  two  fingers  erect  in  making  the  sign  of  the  cross : 
this  meant  that  the  doctrine  of  the  Trinity  was  wrong 
with  the  Greeks.  The  Greeks  in  their  processions  did 
not  follow  the  rising  and  setting  of  the  sun :  it  was 
because  they  did  not  wish  to  follow  Christ  and  to  tread 
down  hell,  the  realm  of  darkness. 

But  if  the  Russian  was  to  be  considered  as  the  only 
true  and  righteous  church,  where  were  then  the  out- 
ward signs  of  this  righteousness — the  Russian  saints 


THE  RELIGIOUS  TRADITION  77 

and  miracle-workers?  We  know  how  large  was  the 
part  assigned  to  saints  in  the  Russian  church.  If  saints 
could  be  found  to  exist  in  Russia  in  sufficient  numbers, 
this  would  serve  of  itself  as  a  proof  that  religious 
formulas  were  effective,  and  religious  work  was  oper- 
ating in  the  Russian  church.  Tw^o  consecutive  coun- 
cils assembled  in  1547  and  1549  in  order  to  bring  to 
notice  information  about  all  Russian  saints  who  were 
locally  venerated,  and  duly  to  canonize  them.  Twenty- 
two  were  found  at  the  first  and  seventeen  at  the  second 
council.  In  these  three  years  more  was  done  than  in 
all  the  five  centuries  of  the  previous  existence  of  the 
Russian  church.  The  national  church  was  rich  now^ 
and  so  had  no  reason  to  envy  the  "two  first  Romes." 
Of  course,  there  were  no  great  luminaries  among  these 
"new  miracle-workers,"  as  they  were  called;  no  lights 
of  faith  or  of  religious  science.  But  then,  in  Russia 
the  idea  of  a  saint  was  as  different  from  that  of  both 
the  oriental  and  the  occidental  church  as  were  the 
doctrine  and  religious  life.  A  Russian  saint — i.  e.,  a 
really  popular  saint,  not  an  official  one — was  not  ex- 
pected to  possess  exquisite  qualities  of  mind,  a  power 
of  deep  thought,  an  intense  religious  feeling,  or  a 
strong  will.  He  was  not  appreciated  according  to  his 
theological  knowledge,  mystic  penetration,  or  admin- 
istrative talents.  The  obstacles  he  had  to  overcome, 
the  pains  he  had  to  suffer,  must  be  made  visible  and 
easy  to  be  understood  by  everybody.  They  were  to 
be  physical  pain  and  endurance.  Thus  he  had  to 
stroll  about  in  the  streets  naked  during  the  most 
severe  winter  frosts,  and  to  mortify  his  llesh,  not  only 
by  fasting,  but  with  real  wounds  and  real  bloodshed. 


78  RUSSIA  AND  ITS  CRISIS 

Therefore  he  wore  a  heavy  iron  collar  around  his 
neck  or  a  chain  about  his  waist  riveted  too  closely  to 
be  unfastened.  And  the  iron  would  eat  into  his  very 
body,  staining  his  clothes  with  blood.  His  appearance 
was  squalid  and  disgusting:  long  hair,  never  cut  or 
combed,  hung  about  his  shoulders;  his  eyes  looked 
wild,  or  dull  and  dim.  His  dress,  if  he  wore  any,  was 
in  rags.  He  was  always  insane,  or  he  affected  insanity ; 
the  broken  sentences  he  spoke  were  as  void  of  mean- 
ing as  an  oracle's — and  as  apt  to  be  turned  into  a 
prophecy  or  an  admonition.  But  by  reason  of  this 
very  vagueness  he  enjoyed  a  quite  exceptional  free- 
dom of  speech,  even  in  the  times  of  the  Terrible  Johns 
of  Russian  history.  He  was  venerated  just  as  a 
lunatic  through  whose  mouth  God  himself  was  under- 
stood to  pronounce  judgments;  his  was  the  only  mode 
of  life  fit  to  escape  the  sinful  ways  of  the  world  of 
those  days.  Thus  the  world  appreciated  him  as  its 
living  contradiction  and  suffered  him  to  be  its  uncom- 
promising accuser.  Do  not  think  this  a  fanciful  sketch, 
for  in  Russia  you  may  meet  with  this  "beatified"  per- 
son in  history  as  well  as  in  actual  life;  in  Fletcher's 
account  of  his  travels  in  the  sixteenth  century,  as  well 
as  in  Gleb  Ouspensky's  modern  novel. 

Russia  now,  as  we  have  seen,  had  got  her  national 
type  of  religion.  It  was  definitely  framed  and  officially 
sanctioned  as  early  as  the  middle  of  the  sixteenth 
century.  People  were  proud  to  possess  at  their  home 
in  Moscow  the  best  and  the  purest  Christianity  in  the 
world.  They  were  extremely  flattered  to  be  intrusted 
with  its  preservation  imto  the  end  of  time.  The  foun- 
dations of  religious  tradition  seemed  to  be  laid  down 


THE  RELIGIOUS  TRADITION  79 

firmly  for  all  time  to  come.  We  must  add  that  at  the 
end  of  the  sixteenth  century  the  Russian  church  at 
least  became  autocephalic :  she  had  her  own  patriarch 
at  Moscow.  But  scarcely  had  a  century  passed  before 
this  national  tradition  was  completely  destroyed  by  the 
state.  It  was  in  opposition  to  the  Greeks  that  this 
national  tradition  had  been  formulated.  Now,  the 
authority  of  the  Greeks  in  matters  of  religion  was 
fully  re-established.  Everything  that  did  not  con- 
form to  the  Greek  church  in  ritual  and  in  teachinsf 
was  declared  schismatic.  Russian  books  of  divine 
service  were  found  to  be  spoiled  by  alterations  and 
interpolations.  New  translations  from  Greek  texts 
were  ordered  and  printed;  and  these  "new  books" 
were  to  be  introduced  everywhere  for  general  use, 
while  the  "old  books"  were  to  be  burned.  Such  were 
the  exact  commands  of  the  imperious  patriarch  Neekon, 
the  "friend  of  the  Greeks." 

Of  course,  "old  books"  and  old  national  tradition 
that  had  to  be  thus  canceled  could  not  fail  to  find 
fervent  defenders  in  the  world  of  the  Muscovite  Ortho- 
doxy. We  know  what  the  spirit  of  the  national  church 
was.  People  had  been  taught  to  believe  firmly  in  the 
infallibility  of  their  rites.  Russian  rites  were  thought 
to  be  the  only  true  ones  in  the  world.  If  they  were 
now  condemned  by  the  official  authorities  of  the  Rus- 
sian church,  it  could  only  mean — in  the  eyes  of  the 
people — that  the  official  Russian  church  itself  was 
falling  away  from  the  true  faith.  This  event  had  even 
been  foretold  in  "old  books."  The  very  time  of  the 
Russian  apostasy  had  been  foreseen  :  it  was  to  come 
at  the  beginning  of  the  second  half  of  the  seventeenth 


8o  RUSSIA  AND  ITS  CRISIS 

century.  And  at  that  precise  moment  it  came.  The 
Russian  church — Neekon's  church — had  itself  become 
dehnquent  from  the  point  of  view  of  men  who  were 
stigmatized  by  the  church  authorities  as  "Schismatics." 
It  would  seem  that  in  this  conflict  the  official  church, 
while  taking  the  side  of  the  Greeks  as  against  her  own 
immediate  past,  represented  the  higher  civilization. 
Low  as  might  be  the  religious  level  of  the  Greek 
eastern  church,  it  was  doubtless  higher  than  that  of 
the  Russian  national  religion.  And  such  was,  of 
course,  the  general  meaning  of  Neekon's  reform.  But 
we  must  add  that,  in  fact,  Neekon,  while  undertaking 
his  reform,  did  not  represent  at  all  the  view  of  the 
eastern  church  in  his  conflict  with  the  popular  religion. 
For  this  latter  view  was  formulated  in  a  letter  that 
the  patriarch  of  Constantinople  had  written  to  the 
Russian  Tsar,  in  order  to  tell  him  that  a  mere  differ- 
ence in  rite  was  a  matter  of  small  importance.  There 
were  differences  enough  among  oriental  churches  them- 
selves, the  patriarch  asserted;  but  that  was  not  a 
sufficient  reason  for  proclaiming  any  one  of  these 
churches  schismatic.  The  patriarch  might  also  have 
added — if  he  had  known  this  fact,  revealed  by  modern 
research — that  some  of  the  old  Russian  differences  in 
rite  also  occurred  in  the  Syrian  church,  whence  the 
Russian  people  might  have  borrowed  them  through 
the  intervention  of  their  first  metropolitan  at  Keeyev, 
a  man  of  Syrian  origin.  The  point  of  view  of  Neekon 
was  quite  different  from  the  patriarch's ;  it  was  essen- 
tially the  same  as  that  of  the  "Old-believers,"  his 
enemies,  who  indeed,  before  he  had  become  the  "friend 
of  the  Greeks,"  had  been  his  "friends."     The  ritual 


THE  RELIGIOUS  TRADITION  8i 

seemed  to  both  parties  to  be  as  necessary  for  salvation 
as  dogma.  Hence  both  Neekon  and  his  antagonists 
were  quite  sure  that  there  could  exist  only  one  formula 
for  every  rite ;  if  the  formula  was  not  right,  God  was 
"blasphemed,"  instead  of  being  praised,  in  the  per- 
formance of  the  rite.  The  question  was  now :  which 
formula  was  right — Greek  or  Russian?  That  they 
might  be  equally  admissible  was  beyond  the  under- 
standing of  a  Russian  of  that  epoch. 

Thus  Neekon's  reaction  against  the  national  re- 
ligion was  in  its  spirit  and  substance  entirely  national. 
It  could  not  be  taken  by  its  contemporaries  as  a  step 
forward  in  the  understanding  of  religion.  But,  on 
the  other  hand,  it  annihilated  the  former  step,  the  only 
one  that  Russian  people  had  really  taken.  This  former 
step  consisted  in  teaching  Christian  rites  to  a  people 
entirely  pagan.  The  second  step  would  consist  in 
teaching  the  spirit  of  ritual  to  the  ritualistic  believers 
in  its  letter.  Neekon,  however,  wished  his  flock,  not 
to  learn  the  second  step,  but  to  unlearn  the  first.  And 
so  the  rupture  was  accomplished;  an  anathema  was 
proclaimed  upon  the  "Schismatics"  by  a  council  of 
bishops  in  the  year  1667. 

The  consequences  of  this  formal  breach  of  tradition 
for  the  Russian  church  were  innumerable.  The  fruit 
of  many  centuries  of  development  had  to  be  cut  off. 
A  new  start  was  to  be  made,  which  was  discredited 
in  advance  by  the  faithful  adherents  of  the  national 
tradition.  The  result  was  that  the  people  would  not 
follow  their  official  leaders,  and  thus  the  creed  became 
twofold :  the  popular  religion  separated  itself  from 
the   official.      The    "true   fold"    became   thus   almost 


82  RUSSIA  AND  ITS  CRISIS 

entirely  empty  and  void  of  religious  devotion.    Those 
who  could  make  use  of  the  religious  reform  of  Neekon 
for  their  further  religious  development  were  few.    The 
average  believers  were  the  *'01d  Ritualists,"  the  uncom- 
promising supporters  of  the  "old  books."    They  turned 
their  back  on  the  official  church.     Outside  these  two 
categories,  the  adherents  of  Neekon  and  the  adherents 
of  the  old  belief,  there  remained  the  great  bulk  of 
plain,   wholly   illiterate   folk,   who   were   either   com- 
pletely indifferent  to  religion,  or  inclined  to  take  the 
side  of  the  "Old-believers."     But  the  "Old-believers" 
were  condemned  by  the  church  as  Schismatics.     Thus 
there  remained  no  moral  link  between  the  common 
people  and  the  few  learned  divines  of  the  established 
church.    The  true  religious  life  was,  in  the  eyes  of  the 
people,  that  of  the  opponents  of  the  official  church.  The 
learned  religion  of  the  instructed  few  was,  henceforth, 
concentrated  in  schools,  and  these  presently  adopted 
Latin,  the  learned  language  of  the  European  theology. 
They  did  not.  however,  invent  any  original  theological 
system;    instead  they  were  continually  wavering  be- 
tween Protestant  and  Catholic  authorities  on  theology. 
They  were  busy  confuting  the  first  by  the  arguments 
of  the  second,  and  the  second  by  the  arguments  of  the 
first.     And  this  was  the  method  by  which  the  Russian 
theology  was  formed.     The  common  people  no  longer 
listened  to  these  theologians,   and   so  they   were   at 
liberty  to  preach   freedom  of  will  or  predestination, 
good  works  or  grace;    in  short,  whatever  they  liked. 
But  whatever  their  opinion  was,  the  church  was  not 
in  the  least  bound  by  their  theological  lucubrations. 
Obliged  to  keep  a  constant  equilibrium  between  the 


THE  RELIGIOUS  TRADITION  83 

Bible  and  the  Seven  Councils,  the  councils  and  the 
elaborate  science  of  theology  of  Christian  churches 
more  advanced  in  learning,  Russian  theologians  neces- 
sarily became  eclectics. 

As  far  as  the  laity  is  concerned,  the  only  instructed 
men  among  them  belonged,  at  this  time,  to  the  class 
of  the  tsarish  officials.  Of  course,  they  had  to  be  on 
the  side  of  the  official  church,  whatever  might  be  their 
own  views  on  religion.  The  consequence  was  that  an 
atmosphere  of  religious  indifference  was  formed  in 
this  only  educated  class,  and  this  indifference  in  its 
turn  became  a  tradition.  Thus,  at  the  very  moment 
when  a  powerful  wave  of  foreign  culture  poured  upon 
Russia  from  abroad,  the  spiritual  life  of  this  class  was 
barren.  Nothing  stood  in  the  way  of  their  now  be- 
coming in  soul  and  body  the  "apes  of  Europe."  Re- 
ligion could  form  no  obstacle  to  this  desire  to  imitate 
foreign  culture,  and  no  other  hindrance  existed. 

Thus  the  breaking  of  the  old  religious  tradition 
was  the  prelude  to  Peter  the  Great's  reform :  it  helped 
the  higher  class  to  achieve  a  complete  departure  from 
the  old  culture  of  the  lower  strata  of  Russian  society.^ 
The  same  break  prevented  also  the  further  spontaneous 
development  of  the  common  people's  religion  within 
the  "true  fold"  of  the  official  church.  Outside,  there 
was  going  on  a  very  peculiar  and  multifarious  religious 
development  among  Russian  dissenters  and  sectarians ; 
but  the  established  church  did  not  profit  by  that  kind 
of  religious  development.  Accordingly,  the  official 
church  was  morally  very  much  weakened.  And  this 
weakness  brought  forth  a  further  consequence  for  the 

^  See  above,  pp.  43,  44. 


84  RUSSIA  AND  ITS  CRISIS 

official  church,  which  must  now  be  mentioned :    the 
secularization  of  the  Russian  church. 

Of  course,  the  beginnings  of  this  process  of  secular- 
ization are  to  be  discovered  many  centuries  before 
the  religious  break  of  the  established  church  with  the 
"Old-believers."  The  preponderance  of  the  state 
authority  in  matters  of  religion  is  known  to  be  one  of 
the  most  characteristic  features  of  the  eastern  churches 
in  general.  The  Byzantine  emperor  shared  with  the 
patriarch  the  power  which  the  Roman  popes  alone 
possessed.  The  emperor  appointed  and  dismissed  the 
bishops;  he  presided  over  the  councils  and  influenced 
their  decisions.  The  Byzantine  emperor  had  his  share 
of  power  also  over  the  Russian  branch  of  the  Con- 
stantinopolitan  patriarchate.  In  proportion  as  the  Rus- 
sian church  became  independent,  Russian  princes  in- 
herited the  religious  rights  of  the  emperor.  Moreover, 
Muscovite  grand  dukes  made  a  large  use  of  the  as- 
cendency which  their  position  as  the  "only  remaining 
Christian  Tsars  in  the  whole  world"  had  given  them. 
Their  clergy  were  the  first  to  call  them  "Tsars  and 
autocrators."  But  they  were  not  satisfied  with  this. 
For  after  having  strengthened,  by  the  help  of  the 
church,  their  own  position,  they  began  to  feel  uncom- 
fortable when  face  to  face  with  the  church's  increasing 
wealth,  and  the  growing  popularity  of  the  new  patri- 
arch of  Muscovy.  They  more  than  once  tried  to  dimin- 
ish the  rights  of  the  church  regarding  landed  property 
and  clerical  jurisdiction.  But  more  than  once  they 
were  obliged  to  repeal  their  measures  or  not  to  bring 
them  into  execution.  Nay,  in  the  first  half  of  the 
seventeenth  century  they  were   forced  to  yield   new 


THE  RELIGIOUS  TRADITION  85 

power  to  the  church :  they  were  brought  to  an  actual 
division  of  power,  to  a  duarchy  of  Tsar  and  patriarch ; 
after  which  Neekon  formally  renewed  the  mediaeval 
theories  of  Hildebrand.  All  this  was  possible  as  long 
as  the  nationalistic  theory  of  religion  stood  firm  and 
the  patriarchs  knew  that  the  whole  population  was 
backing  them.  Now,  as  soon  as  the  nationalistic  theory 
of  religion  was  doomed  as  spurious,  the  great  bulk  of 
its  former  supporters  were  proclaimed  enemies  of  the 
church,  and  the  official  head  of  the  church  was  no 
longer  dangerous.  And,  too,  there  soon  remained  no 
danger  for  the  state  in  the  body  of  the  higher  clergy. 
Learned  monks  from  the  west  of  Russia  gradually 
took  the  place  of  the  fanatical  divines  of  the  old  Mus- 
covite stock.  And  the  new  clergy,  not  feeling  obliged 
to  support  the  universal  claims  of  the  national  church, 
proved  to  be  much  more  obsequious  to  the  secular 
authorities.  They  were  quite  ready  to  surrender  the 
position  of  independence  which  the  Russian  church 
still  possessed;  and  nobody  was  there  to  defend  it. 
Thus  the  circumstances  were  most  propitious  when 
Peter  the  Great  came.  With  the  help  of  one  of  those 
western  prelates,  Theophanes  Procopowitz,  known  to 
sympathize  with  Protestant  views,  Peter  substituted 
for  the  patriarch  a  collegiate  body,  the  "most  holy 
governing  synod."  Those  who  are  surprised  at  the 
ease  with  which  this  important  reform  was  achieved 
may  consider  that  the  national  church  was  much  too 
weak  just  then  to  resist  this  measure,  and  that  the 
very  essence  of  eastern  Christianity  made  it  possible 
for  the  organization  of  the  church  to  be  changed  by 
a  mere  decree  of  the  secular  power.    The  eastern  church 


86  RUSSIA  AND  ITS  CRISIS 

has  not  to  decide  the  fundamental  questions  of  doctrine, 
for  they  are  supposed  to  be  definitely  settled  by  the 
Seven  Councils.  She  has  only  to  preserve  the  received 
tradition  from  any  further  change.  Her  daily  action 
thus  is  of  a  purely  administrative  character.  There- 
fore, as  long  as  no  extraordinary  question  arises,  the 
half-secular  organization  of  the  Russian  church  seems 
to  be  entirely  sufficient.  Just  such  a  question  arose,  of 
course,  even  at  the  time  of  Peter  the  Great,  when 
the  theologians  of  the  Sorbonne  proposed  to  Russian 
divines  a  discussion  regarding  the  unification  of  the 
churches.  At  that  time  the  "keeper  of  the  patriarch's 
seat,"  an  enemy  of  Peter's  reform  (Stephen  Yavorsky), 
replied  that  Russian  bishops  were  as  unable  to  decide 
anything  in  such  a  momentous  question  as  the  limbs  of 
the  body  would  be  unable  to  move  without  the  head. 
From  this  time  the  anti-canonic  position  of  the  Holy 
Synod  became  still  more  obvious.  The  synod  had  got 
its  head ;  but  this  head  was  a  minister  of  the  state,  not 
the  head  of  the  church.  Peter  the  Great  had  already 
appointed  a  Superior  Procurator,  who  was  to  be  chosen 
among  the  commissioned  officers  ("one  who  would  be 
daring  enough,"  as  the  imperial  order  ran),  and  whose 
role  was  to  control  the  activity  of  the  Holy  Synod.  In 
the  course  of  the  nineteenth  century  the  Superior  Pro- 
curator became  the  actual  chief  of  the  ecclesiastical 
office,  and  the  Holy  Synod  became  a  ministry  of  cult. 
That  is  why  it  has  lost  every  moral  influence  over  the 
religious  life  of  the  nation.  As  a  rule,  its  actions  pass 
without  attracting  much  attention ;  but  it  sounded 
uterly  incongruous  when  the  actual  procurator,  Mr. 
Pobedonostsev,  tried  to  recall  old  times  by  launching 


THE  RELIGIOUS  TRADITION  87 

an  excommunication  against  the  new  heresiarch,  Count 
Leo  Tolstoy.  Some  petty  shopkeepers  and  green- 
grocers alone  applauded  the  decision  of  the  Holy  Spirit 
residing  in  Petersburg;  but  there  was  no  end  of 
laughing  among  the  educated  classes  over  this  decision 
dictated  to  a  dozen  crazy  sexagenarians  by  a  prelate 
in  lay  dress.  After  having  allowed  Russia  for  two 
centuries  to  believe  in  whatever  it  wished — which  for 
the  upper  layer  was  equal  to  a  permission  not  to  believe 
in  anything  at  all — it  was  rather  late,  and  certainly 
ridiculous,  to  attempt  the  punishment  of  the  only  man 
who  was  trying  to  inculcate  into  Russian  society  a 
doctrine  which  at  least  was  a  sort  of  religion.  It  was 
as  if  a  hero  of  a  former  generation,  after  a  centennial 
sleep,  should  try  to  unbend  his  stififened  joints,  in  order 
to  achieve  one  of  his  old-time  strokes;  but  the  limbs 
dangle  palsied  and  powerless;  a  too  long  inactivity 
has  benumbed  them.  And  people  who  had  believed 
in  the  giant's  legendary  strength  were  now  reassured ; 
there  was  no  danger  to  be  feared  from  this  venerable 
relic.  Mr.  Pobedonostsev  meant  to  bring  about  a 
revival;  but  instead,  what  he  did  became  matter  for 
derision. 

We  cannot  expect,  of  course,  to  find  more  life  in 
the  members  than  we  have  found  in  the  head  of  the 
official  church.  The  parish  priests  remained  what  they 
always  were — the  official  performers  of  rites,  instead  of 
becoming  the  pastors  of  souls.  The  only  thing  that 
the  village  people  wanted  from  their  parsons  was  "that 
there  might  be  singing  in  the  churches  [by  which  they 
meant  that  the  divine  offices  might  be  performed], 
and  that  deceased  Christians  should  not  remain  witii- 
out  burial." 


88  RUSSIA  AND  ITS  CRISIS 

Higher  duties  than  these  the  aspirants  to  curacies 
could  hardly  perform.  Indeed,  these  aspirants  were 
often  chosen  from  among  the  peasants ;  and  even  when 
they  were  sons  of  clergymen  it  was  not  expected  that 
they  should  know  how  to  read  and  write,  to  say 
nothing  of  their  having  any  knowledge  of  general 
theology.  Down  to  the  second  half  of  the  eighteenth 
century,  candidates  had  to  undergo,  before  their  ordina- 
tion, an  examination  at  the  bishop's  court.  But  this 
they  passed  quite  easily :  the  illiterate  would  give 
money  to  their  examiners,  and  were  then  required  to 
learn  by  heart  some  two  or  three  passages  from  the 
Psalter;  and  they  were  then  certain  to  be  asked  to 
read  one  of  these  passages  at  the  examination.  By 
and  by  the  clergy  became  so  numerous  that  there  was 
no  room  for  more.  So  they  formed  a  levitic  caste, 
whose  social  position  was  a  flagrant  contradiction  to 
their  spiritual  vocation.  The  peasants  hated  them  for 
their  greediness  and  rapacity — vices  that  were  pro- 
voked by  the  material  difficulties  of  a  Russian  clergy- 
man's life.  For  they,  receiving  no  fixed  appointments 
from  the  government,  were  obliged  to  live  on  voluntary 
contributions.  Generally  these  were  very  modest. 
Thus  the  village  priests  were  obliged  to  wear  peasant's 
clothes  and  to  work  in  the  fields ;  and  accordingly  they 
were  quite  unable  to  inspire  their  spiritual  flock  with 
respect  or  deference.  The  squires  looked  down  on 
them  and  did  not  spare  them  any  humiliation.  On 
a  holiday  a  parson  was  obliged  to  call  on  his  squire, 
bringing  the  cross,  to  sing  some  prayers  in  his  drawing- 
room.  Then  he  was  invited  to  drink,  and  after  both 
the  host  and  the  guest  had  become  tipsy,  the  parson 


THE  RELIGIOUS  TRADITION  89 

ran  the  risk  of  a  beating  or  of  a  ducking  in  the  manorial 
pond ;  of  being  bitten  by  the  squire's  dogs,  or  flogged 
until  he  swooned;  sometimes  he  had  to  flee  for  his 
life.  Indeed,  as  late  as  the  middle  of  the  nineteenth 
century,  all  the  innumerable  whims  of  a  drunken  squire 
could  with  entire  impunity  be  inflicted  upon  his  parson. 
But  it  was  only  in  his  bishop's  court  that  a  curate  could 
undergo  formal  torture.  Being  low  in  morals  and 
character,  a  parson  often  incurred  the  punishment 
legally ;  but  still  more  often  he  was  flogged,  deprived 
of  food,  and  imprisoned  for  not  having  been  able  to 
satisfy  the  avidity  of  the  bishop  and  his  men.  The 
position,  as  we  see,  was  not  to  be  envied ;  and  nobody 
from  the  higher  classes  ever  wished  to  occupy  it. 

The  consequence  of  all  this  was  that  the  caste  of  the 
clergy  prevented,  rather  than  increased,  the  spread  of 
a  deeper  religious  instruction  and  feeling  among  the 
Russian  people.  The  following  witness,  for  instance, 
refers  to  the  facts  of  the  middle  of  the  nineteenth 
century : 

Could  the  people  respect  the  clergy  when  they  heard  how 
one  priest  had  stolen  money  from  beneath  the  pillow  of  a  dying 
man  at  the  moment  of  confession,  how  another  had  been  publicly 
dragged  out  of  a  house  of  ill-fame,  how  a  third  had  christened 
a  dog,  how  a  fourth  while  officiating  at  the  Easter  service  was 
dragged  by  the  hair  from  the  altar  by  the  deacon?  Was  it  pos- 
sible for  the  people  to  respect  priests  who  spent  their  time  in  the 
gin-shop,  wrote  fraudulent  petitions,  fought  with  the  cross  in 
their  hands,  and  abused  each  other  in  vile  language  at  the  altar? 
One  might  fill  several  pages  with  examples  of  this  kind — in  each 
instance  naming  the  time  and  place — without  going  beyond  the 
boundaries  of  the  province  of  Nizhni-Novgorod. 

I  chose  this  quotation  from  an  official  report;  you 
may  read  more  of  it  in  the  excellent  book  of   Mr. 


90 


RUSSIA  AND  ITS  CRISIS 


Mackenzie   Wallace  about   Russia    (see   the   chapter 
"The  Village  Priest"). 

Not  only  was  the  quality  of  spiritual  food,  thus 
supplied  by  the  official  church,  very  low.  Its  quantity 
also  was  quite  insufficient ;  and  it  went  on  diminishing 
with  the  growth  of  the  general  indifference  and  distrust 
of  the  ways  of  salvation  within  the  "true  fold."  One 
of  the  attractions  which  the  "Old-believers"  had  for 
Russian  peasantry  was  that  they  very  often  provided 
them  with  priests  and  with  divine  office  in  such  places 
of  Russia  where  there  were  no  priests  of  the  established 
church.  To  be  sure,  the  absolute  number  of  Orthodox 
priests  and  churches  increased  with  time;  but  this 
increase  was  far  from  proportionate  to  the  growth 
of  the  Orthodox  population.  The  following  figures 
may  help  you  to  realize  to  how  large  an  extent  this 
disproportion  increased  during  the  last  century  and  a 
half: 

For  Every  100,000  Inhabitants  During  the  Year 


Churches 

Secular  clergy  (including  sextons) 

Monasteries 

Regular  clergy  (includ.  novices)  \  ^^^^ 


1738 


106 

781 

6 

49 

40 


71 

265 

1 .2 

19 

15 


56 

137 

I 

18 

38 


All  this  makes  clear.  I  hope,  how  many  and  how 
important  the  consequences  were  which  followed  the 
break  of  religious  tradition  in  the  middle  of  the  seven- 
teenth century.  The  continuity  of  religious  life  in  the 
official  church  was  stopped.  The  ritualistic  tendencies, 
far  from  being  weakened  thereby,  increased  propor- 


THE  RELIGIOUS  TRADITION  91 

tionately  as  the  indifference  in  matters  of  religion  pre- 
vailed. The  bishops  and  priests  became  state  officials. 
All  independence  of  spirit  vanished,  together  with  the 
inner  religious  life  of  the  church.  Religion  became 
the  instrument  by  which  the  instructed  class  governed 
the  illiterate  crowd;  i.  c,  the  irreligious  few,  the 
equally  irreligious  multitude.  The  many  who  were 
religious  were  obliged  to  search  for  a  substitute,  and 
to  live  their  religious  life  (whatever  that  life  might  be) 
outside  the  "true  fold"  of  the  official  church. 

Two  different  ways  might  have  been  chosen.  The 
one  was  that  of  the  strict  national  tradition,  so  lately 
betrayed  by  the  official  church.  The  other  was  that  of 
an  entirely  new  movement  deepening  and  enlarging 
the  religious  feeling  and  understanding.  The  former 
was  in  complete  accordance  with  the  past  of  the  Rus- 
sian church ;  the  latter,  in  complete  contradiction  with 
it.  The  first  was  chosen  by  the  so-called  "Old- 
believers,"  or  "Old-ritualists."  The  second  was  ap- 
proved by  the  "sectarians."  We  have  now  to  follow 
the  evolution  of  the  two.^ 

The  "Old-believers,"  to  begin  with  them,  were  also 
divided  into  two  opposite  bodies,  those  "  Acknowledg- 
ing Priests,"  and  the  "  Priestless,"  and  their  signi- 
ficance in  the  development  of  the  Russian  popular  faith 
was  far  from  equal.  Both  factions  accused  the  official 
church  of  having  betrayed  the  Orthodox  religion.  But 
the  "Acknowledging  Priests"  thought  that  the  true 
church  still  continued  to  exist  in  their  own  midst.    The 

-  To  make  general  lines  of  development  and  mutual  relations 
between  different  factions  of  the  Russian  "  Old-belief "  and  sec- 
tarianism more  easy  to  follow,  a  "  synoptic  table  "  is  appended,  show- 
ing also   the   time   of   first   appearance   of   these   sects   and    factions 


92 


RUSSIA  AND  ITS  CRISIS 


THE  RELIGIOUS  TRADITION  93 

"Priestless"  held  to  the  extreme  opinion  that  no  church 
whatever  existed,  and  that  the  second  advent  was  on 
its  way.  This  decisive  view,  however,  was  not  adhered 
to  at  once  even  by  this  uncompromising  party  of  the 
"Old-behevers."  Some  time  after  their  excommunica- 
tion at  the  council  of  1667,  the  Schismatics  were 
uncertain  and  wavered  between  the  two  views  just 
mentioned.  According  to  the  chances  either  of  recon- 
quering the  former  dominant  position  of  the  old  creed, 
or  of  being  obliged  to  surrender  in  the  struggle  with 
the  established  church,  they  alternately  clung  to  the 
idea  of  the  existence  of  a  church  or  to  that  of  the 
reign  of  Antichrist.  But  in  measure,  as  the  years 
went  on  and  the  hope  for  a  re-establishment  diminished, 
they  were  brought  to  choose  between  these  opposite 
views.  Moreover,  the  choice  became  quite  unavoidable, 
because  they  actually  remained  without  priests  and 
legal  hierarchy.  At  the  moment  when  the  "Old- 
believers"  were  proclaimed  Schismatics  by  the  estab- 
lished church,  they  had  no  bishops  in  their  midst. 
Thus  their  priests  could  not  be  duly  ordained,  and 
accordingly  they  could  not  administer  sacraments. 
Now,  it  was  understood  that  a  church  without  sacra- 
ments was  no  church  at  all;  its  further  independent 
existence,  therefore,  became  impossible.  And,  indeed, 
their  theologians  did  not  fail  to  find,  contrary  to  the 
current  doctrine,  that  Holy  Writ  itself  foretold  the 
extinction  of  the  Christian  church  on  the  eve  of  the 
coming  of  Antichrist.  In  its  turn,  the  extinction  of 
the  church  served  in  their  view  to  prove  that  the  end 
of  time  was  approaching.  Therefore  the  extreme  fac- 
tion gave  themselves  up  to  wait  for  Antichrist,  which 


94  RUSSIA  AND  ITS  CRISIS 

made  all  further  questioning  about  the  future  super- 
fluous. 

But  the  moderate  faction,  even  though  they  believed 
in  the  coming  of  Antichrist,  did  not  dare  accept  the 
bold  theory  of  the  complete  extinction  of  the  church. 
Had  it  not  been  promised  by  Christ  himself,  they 
objected,  that  the  church  should  exist  until  the  end  of 
time?  Of  course,  there  were  no  bishops  in  their  midst ; 
but  this  only  meant  that  Orthodox  bishops  must  be 
supposed  to  exist  somewhere  else,  say  in  the  far  East. 
The  only  task  was  then  to  find  out  where  they  were 
hidden.  Meanwhile  they  acquiesced  in  acknowledging 
even  such  priests  as  came  to  the  schism  from  the  official 
church. 

Thus  the  moderate  set  of  the  "Old-believers"  was 
brought  to  "acknowledge  priests."  This  implied,  how- 
ever, an  inconsistent  supposition  that  some  scraps  at 
least  of  Orthodoxy  were  still  lingering  in  the  official 
church.  But  why  then  leave  it  at  all  ?  In  fact,  attempts 
at  full  reconciliation  were  more  than  once  really  made. 
Were  it  not  for  the  uncompromising  spirit  of  the 
established  churchj  the  reconciliation  would  have  been 
attained  long  ago.  Failing  that,  the  "Old-believers" 
who  "acknowledged  priests"  went  on  searching  for 
bishops  of  their  own.  After  a  century  of  search,  they 
succeeded  in  founding  an  independent  hierarchy,  whose 
first  chief  was  an  Orthodox  bishop  from  the  Balkans. 
He  consented  to  be  "corrected"  regarding  some  details 
in  the  rite  of  his  consecration  according  to  the  demands 
of  the  "Old-believers,"  and  took  his  metropolitan  seat 
at  Bailaya  Kreenitza,  in  Austria,  close  to  the  Russian 
frontier,  in   1846.     Then  he  ordained  many  Russian 


THE  RELIGIOUS  TRADITION  95 

bishops,  and  now  the  "Austrian  hierarchy"  flourishes 
in  Russia.  Many  "Old-behevers/'  however,  do  not 
acknowledge  the  Austrian  bishops,  owing  to  some 
doubts  about  the  "corrections"  of  the  first  metropohtan, 
and  also  because  this  great  change  too  was  an  "innova- 
tion," not  likely  to  please  the  illiterate  conservative 
crowd  who  had  grown  accustomed  to  their  "  fugitive 
priests." 

We  see  that  this  set  of  the  "Old-believers"  did  not 
go  much  astray  from  the  highroad  of  Russian  Ortho- 
doxy. Centuries  of  persecution  and  the  constant  neces- 
sity of  searching  for  new  issues  and  of  adjusting  them 
to  the  strict  letter  of  the  canons  helped,  of  course,  this 
faction  to  keep  alive  their  religious  interest.  But 
there  was  no  inner  incitement  for  them  to  come  to  a 
deeper  religious  understanding.  Their  religious  ideal 
was  behind  them;  their  theological  tendency  was 
chiefly  conservative;  thus  they  ended  by  coming  back 
to  their  starting-point,  and  they  brought  with  them 
only  what  they  had  lost  at  the  very  beginning  of  their 
religious  pilgrimage,  the  fulness  of  hierarchy;  and 
even  this  they  got  by  dint  of  a  very  doubtful  com- 
promise. 

Richer  by  far  was  the  religious  life  of  the  extreme 
set  of  the  "Old-believers"  —  that  of  the  "  Priestless  " 
people.  Their  beginnings  were  quite  revolutionary. 
They  prepared  for  the  coming  of  Antichrist;  hence 
they  did  not  wish  to  acquiesce  in  any  compromise. 
Antichrist  was  in  their  view  Peter  the  Great.  His 
personality,  his  reforms,  his  aversion  to  everything 
that  was  old,  his  persecution  of  schism,  his  way  of 
treating  religion,  all  served  to  prove  that  the  Father 


96  RUSSIA  AND  ITS  CRISIS 

of  Lies  was  himself  reigning  in  person.  In  conse- 
quence, there  was  no  salvation  for  the  people  who 
should  remain  in  the  "world."  Their  device  was,  then, 
to  flee  from  the  world  and,  if  possible,  from  life  alto- 
gether. "Save  yourself  by  flight  into  the  wilderness, 
and  if  you  are  sought  for  by  the  authorities,  burn 
yourself  or  drown  yourself  or  perish  by  starvation, 
whichever  you  like,  and  you  will  deserve  a  crown  of 
martyrdom."  Such  became  now  their  rule  of  life. 
Just  at  the  moment  when  Peter  personally  took  the 
reins  (in  1691),  the  second  advent  was  expected,  and 
there  was  a  very  epidemic  of  burnings :  not  less  than 
twenty  thousand  perished  by  fire.  The  woods  and 
wastes  north  of  the  Volga  were  the  center  of  this 
"Priestless"  movement:  in  the  tundras  of  the  White 
Sea  region  they  founded  their  larger  communities. 

But  as  soon  as  these  communities  (particularly  the 
chief  one  among  them,  on  the  river  Wig)  were  built, 
the  relation  of  the  "Priestless"  to  the  "world"  began 
to  change.  People  who  admitted  no  sacraments  were 
obliged  to  permit  married  pairs  to  live  in  their  midst. 
Men  who  looked  at  the  state  authorities  as  servants  of 
the  devil  were  obliged  to  pay  taxes,  to  serve  in  the 
army,  and  even  to  receive  passports,  the  very  "seal  of 
Antichrist."  Fanatics  who  shunned  every  contact  with 
the  "outsiders"  could  not  avoid  meeting  them  in  the 
market-place,  or  even  the  buying  of  victuals  from 
them.  These  concessions  to  the  "world"  called  forth 
a  protest  from  some  members  of  the  community.  A 
certain  Philip  in  1744  persuaded  many  of  them  to  be 
burned  alive  rather  than  take  the  seal  of  Antichrist 
and  pray  for  the  Tsar,  as  they  were  ordered  by  the 


THE  RELIGIOUS  TRADITION  97 

authorities.  A  like  opposition  was  kindled  by  the  head 
of  another  "Priestless"  community,  a  certain  Theodo- 
sius.  Thus  the  "Priestless"  people  were  divided  into 
three  branches :  the  moderate — who  kept  their  geogra- 
phical name  of  the  "Littorals,"  the  "Shore-dwellers" 
along  the  White  Sea  ("Pomortsee") — and  two  ex- 
treme sects — the  Philippians  and  the  Theodosians. 
But  naturally  enough  the  extreme  factions,  in  their 
turn,  could  not  keep  clear  of  every  compromise  with 
the  world.  The  Theodosians  were  the  first  to  share 
the  fate  of  the  "Shore-dwellers."  They  also  founded 
a  wealthy  and  powerful  community  in  Moscow,  during 
the  reign  of  Catherine  II.,  and  were  obliged  in  their 
turn  to  defer  to  authorities  and  to  converse  with  the 
"secular"  people.  But,  while  indulging  in  these  neces- 
sities of  actual  life,  they  did  not  wish  to  acknowledge 
the  necessity  of  any  compromise  in  doctrine,  and  so 
clung  to  their  original  idea  of  Antichrist's  reign  in  the 
world.  Their  chief  aim  was  thus  to  bring  back  the 
whole  movement  to  the  crazy  enthusiasm  and  fanati- 
cism of  its  old  days.  Accordingly,  the  extreme  faction 
become  more  conservative  in  theory,  than  the  moder- 
ate faction  was.  The  moderate  party,  indeed,  were 
ready  for  a  theoretical  as  well  as  a  practical  com- 
promise. They  did  not  feel  bound  by  the  psychopathic 
strain  of  their  origins;  they  considered  the  needs  of 
the  new  times.  "We  must  not  recoil  in  doubt  before 
the  argument  that  our  fathers  did  not  know  this  or 
that,"  their  theologians  declared.  "Their  life  cannot 
serve  as  an  example  for  us.  They  were  living  far  from 
the  world,  in  the  wilderness  and  in  isolation.  But  we 
live  in  the  midst  of  the  world,  and  we  dwell  surrounded 


98  RUSSIA  AND  ITS  CRISIS 

by  all  kinds  of  temptations."  Thus,  the  moderate  party 
of  the  "Priestless"  proved  to  be  more  inclined  to  inno- 
vations in  doctrine;  they  were  theoretically  more 
radical.  We  may  take  as  an  illustration  their  debates 
on  the  question  of  marriage.  The  difficulty  was  that 
marriage  was  looked  upon  as  a  sacrament;  but,  with 
priests  lacking,  no  sacraments  could  be  performed. 
Therefore  the  Theodosians  did  not  admit  of  marriage 
and  preferred  concubinage.  "It  is  better  to  sin  than  to 
twist  the  teachings  of  the  holy  church,"  they  argued. 
Now,  the  moderate  party,  the  "Shore-dwellers,"  pre- 
ferred to  "twist"  the  old  doctrine  of  faith,  in  order  to 
have  legal  marriages  kept.  The  outlet  they  found  was 
quite  unusual  for  Orthodox  and  "Old-believers."  The 
"Shore-dwellers"  found  themselves  asserting  marriage 
to  be  not  a  sacrament  at  all.  Or  rather,  they  found 
the  sacrament  to  be,  not  what  it  was  supposed  to  mean 
in  the  Orthodox  church — not  a  rite,  but  an  inner 
fact  of  religious  life,  a  state  of  soul.  Marriage  was 
consummated,  they  asserted,  by  the  very  fact  of  union 
of  man  and  woman,  not  by  the  consecration  of  this  fact 
by  the  church  authorities,  by  means  of  a  certain  rite. 
The  way  they  came  to  this  conclusion  was  not  less  un- 
common than  the  conclusion  itself:  they  studied  the 
question  historically  and  dogmatically.  The  ration- 
alistic element  was  thus  entering  into  the  theology  of 
the  "Old-ritualists."  Accordingly,  the  very  idea  of 
the  church  was  to  be  entirely  changed.  The  new  idea 
found  its  expression  in  a  saying  which  thenceforth 
passed  from  "Old-ritualists"  to  our  sectarians :  "The 
church  is  not  in  the  wooden  walls,  but  in  the  ribs." 
This  meant :  the  church  is  not  an  outward  form,  but 
part  of  conscience. 


THE  RELIGIOUS  TRADITION  99 

But  before  we  enter  into  a  closer  study  of  this  new 
and  liberal  view  of  religion,  which  originated  in  the 
midst  of  the  moderate  party  of  the  "Priestless"  people, 
we  must  dwell  on  some  novelties  which  the  extreme 
and  uncompromising  set  of  the  same  party  contrived 
to  bring  into  the  Russian  religious  life.  Antiquated 
though  this  latter  faction  was  on  points  of  rite  and 
dogma,  they  always  tried  to  be  as  radical  as  possible 
on  questions  of  their  relation  to  the  ''world,"  to  the 
"outsiders."  This  was  the  point  where,  in  the  second 
half  of  the  eighteenth  century,  a  vagabond  dreamer, 
Euphemius,  made  the  last  and  most  consistent  attempt 
at  a  revival  and  a  reconstruction  of  the  old  "Priestless" 
doctrine.  He  required  that  the  true  "Priestless"  should 
break  the  temporary  truce  which  even  the  Theodosians 
had  concluded  with  the  world  of  Antichrist,  and  that 
they  might  again  "flee  away  from  town  to  town,"  as 
they  were  doing  at  the  end  of  the  seventeenth  century, 
in  general  expectation  of  the  second  judgment.  But 
in  order  to  prove  most  obviously  that  Antichrist  was 
really  reigning  over  the  world,  Euphemius  modern- 
ized the  antiquated  religious  theory  of  the  "Priestless" 
by  means  of  recasting  it  into  a  radical  social  doctrine. 
Landed  property  was,  according  to  his  teaching,  the 
chief  tie  which  bound  people  to  a  settled  station.  But 
landed  property,  he  affirmed,  was  invented  by  Peter 
the  Great  and  Neekon.  Before  their  time  the  land 
was,  as  it  ought  to  be,  God's ;  therefore  it  must  remain 
for  collective  use  and  possession.  Men  would  again 
become  equal  as  they  had  been  before,  should  they 
return  to  the  pure  doctrine  of  shunning  the  world  and 
Antichrist.    Thus  the  religious  protest  deepened  into  a 


100  RUSSIA  AND  ITS  CRISIS 

complete  rupture  with  the  civil  authorities,  with  the 
state  and  its  law,  with  society  and  its  traditional  morals. 
A  hundred  years  before  Leo  Tolstoy,  his  theory  of 
Christian  anarchism  was  anticipated  by  the  fugitive 
soldier,  Euphemius.  The  followers  of  Euphemius  are 
known  under  the  name  of  "Runners"  or  "Wanderers;" 
they  exist  up  to  the  present  day. 

We  may  thus  conclude  that  in  both  the  moderate 
and  extreme  ramifications  of  the  "Priestless"  the  doc- 
trine decidedly  transgressed  the  orthodox  limits  of  the 
ritualistic  "Old-belief."  But  long  before  this  inner 
evolution  was  accomplished  among  the  Orthodox,  Rus- 
sia received  the  leaven  of  a  purer  faith  in  a  more 
direct  way.  In  a  parallel  line  with  the  "Old-belief," 
modern  sectarianism  has  developed  in  Russia. 

The  fact  of  its  spread  is  as  extremely  important 
for  Russian  culture  as  it  was  entirely  unforeseen  and 
unheeded  by  the  theorists  of  the  Russian  nationalistic 
tradition.  Up  to  the  present  time  Russian  nationalists 
persevere  in  their  serene  conviction  that  Orthodox 
religion  is  an  indestructible  quality  in  the  national  soul. 
No  thorough  change  of  religion  have  they  ever  thought 
possible  for  the  Russian  people.  The  only  change  that 
actually  occurred,  i.  c,  the  "Old-belief,"  they  triumph- 
antly pointed  out  to  be  only  a  more  scrupulous  and 
anxious  clinging  to  the  old  tradition  of  faith.  No 
other  way  of  betraying  the  established  church  seemed 
to  them  likely  ever  to  be  found. 

Such  was  also  the  old  Russian  view  of  religion. 
When,  at  the  end  of  the  sixteenth  century,  a  Russian 
lad,  Boris  Godoonov,  sent  abroad  for  study  by  the  Tsar, 
became  an  Anglican  clergyman,  the  Russian  govern- 


THE  RELIGIOUS  TRADITION  loi 

ment  repeatedly  insisted  upon  his  extradition  for  this 
specious  reason  that  a  man  ''cannot  get  rid  of  his  very 
nature,"  and  thus  the  person  in  question  could  not 
possibly  change  his  religion.  Of  course,  there  were 
some  instances  in  Russian  history  of  men  adopting 
heresy.  But  this  was  explained  as  something  quite 
occasional  and  due  to  foreign  influence. 

Foreign  influence  there  really  was,  as  we  shall  soon 
see;  but  it  worked  along  the  line  of  an  inner  process 
of  religious  development.  It  was  only  when  this  pro- 
cess of  inner  evolution  had  prepared  Russian  people 
to  embrace  new  views  on  religion  that  foreign  influ- 
ence became  operative  and  effective.  And  we  saw  how 
this  preparation  began  while  people  still  remained 
within  the  limits  of  the  "Old-belief." 

In  fact,  this  was  the  same  line  of  religious  develop- 
ment that  we  may  trace,  mutatis  mutandis,  in  western 
Euroi^e  and,  in  general,  everywhere  where  there  was 
any  possibility  of  such  a  development.  It  consisted  in 
making  the  ideas  of  religion  clearer  and  more  abstract 
as  well  as  in  deepening  religious  feeling.  What  the 
psychological  substratum  of  this  development  is,  we 
do  not  undertake  to  show  here;  it  is  quite  sufficient 
for  our  present  purpose  to  find  out  what  was  the 
historical  line  of  the  process.  And  in  this  we  find  in- 
dubitable uniformity.  You  will  remember  what  was 
the  starting-point  of  the  process  in  western  Europe. 
It  took  there  the  shape  of  a  protest  against  mediaeval 
views  on  religion.  Deeper  views  were  found  to  be 
contained  in  earlier  sources  of  Christianity,  and  a 
return  to  the  Scripture  was  felt  necessary.  There  the 
idea  of  an  apostolic  church  was  found  to  be  opposed 


102  RUSSIA  AND  ITS  CRISIS 

to  the  church  of  the  Middle  Ages.  But  this  idea 
served  as  a  germ  for  further  development.  Man  must 
be  in  immediate  communion  with  God;  no  outward 
and  magic  help  of  rite  and  sacrament  for  salvation  was 
to  be  administered  by  the  priests.  Religion  was  to  be 
understood  as  a  reign  of  grace,  not  a  reign  of  strict 
law.  This  again  led  farther:  By  rigid  logic,  the 
idea  of  grace  led  to  the  notion  of  the  church  as  con- 
sisting exclusively  of  such  members  as  had  the  grace 
necessary  for  salvation;  a  church  of  the  predestined, 
as  Calvin  taught;  or  a  church  of  "saints"  and  saved, 
as  the  Independents  preached;  or  a  church  of  free 
believers  individually  adopting  grace,  as  was  the  teach- 
ing of  the  Arminians.  Thus  the  Christianity  of  Paul 
and  Luther  was  shaded  off  into  the  Christianity  of 
such  sectarians  as  believed  in  the  presence  of  the  Holy 
Spirit  in  the  soul  of  man  and  asserted  that  Christianity 
should  be  mystic,  prophetic ;  in  short,  entirely  spiritual. 
Spirit  was  opposed  to  Scripture,  as  Scripture  had  been 
opposed  to  tradition.  Evangelicism  was  evolved  into 
prophetism. 

Of  course,  in  Russia,  as  we  shall  see,  no  such 
logical  succession  of  stages  in  religious  development 
is  to  be  traced.  The  evangelical  forms  of  belief  did  not 
precede  prophetism;  they  appeared  at  the  same  time 
as  the  spiritual  form,  and  even  somewhat  later  per- 
haps. Accordingly,  the  spiritual  belief,  when  it  first 
appeared,  did  not  look  like  a  purified  and  logically 
developed  evangelicism;  on  the  contrary,  it  looked 
inferior,  because  it  was  oddly  enough  intermingled 
with  elements  of  popular  belief,  and  even  of  sheer 
paganism,  with  which  it  still  remained  in  immediate 


THE  RELIGIOUS  TRADITION  103 

touch.  Then,  the  whole  subsequent  history  of  Rus- 
sian evangehcism  and  spiritual  sects  consists  not  so 
much  in  an  evolution  of  doctrine  as  in  a  gradual 
elimination  of  such  elements  as  are  due  to  the  ancient 
religious  notions  of  the  people.  In  this  way  a  higher 
degree  of  understanding  is  reached,  and  reception  of 
more  advanced  forms  of  Protestant  thought  is  made 
possible. 

The  influence  of  Protestant  ideas  on  Russian  belief 
appears  very  early;  it  is  contemporary  with  the  first 
attempts  at  a  religious  reformation  in  Europe  itself. 
The  religious  movement  in  the  Balkans  which  spread 
over  jTiedissval  Europe,  and  found  its  final  expression 
in  the  building  of  such  sects  as  the  Albigenses  in 
France  and  the  Lollards  in  England  in  the  thirteenth 
and  fourteenth  centuries,  had  a  remote  reverberation 
also  in  Russia.  This  influence  of  "Paulikianism,"  fur- 
ther developed  by  other  mystical  teachings  and  rational- 
istic heresies,  came  to  Russia  in  the  fifteenth  century 
through  the  orthodox  channel  of  the  Greek  monasteries 
at  Mount  Athos,  and  through  the  immediate  inter- 
vention of  the  Karaite  Jews,  they  being  also  a  kind 
of  Jewish  Paulinists.  But  until  the  period  of  the 
unification  of  Russia,  at  the  end  of  the  fifteenth  century, 
the  influence  of  those  heretical  doctrines  was  limited 
to  the  most  civilized  parts  of  the  Russia  of  those  times, 
to  the  rich  merchant  republics  of  Pskov  and  Novgorod. 
From  this  last  city  the  heretical  teachings  found  their 
way  to  Moscow,  just  at  the  time  of  the  political  unifica- 
tion, at  the  end  of  the  fifteenth  and  the  beginning  of 
the  sixteenth  century.  But  here  just  then  a  national- 
istic type  of  religion  was  being  formed,  entirely  opposed 


104  RUSSIA  AND  ITS  CRISIS 

to  the  new  currents.  The  nationahstic  rehgion  was 
growing  rituaHstic,  formal,  and  subject  to  state  influ- 
ence. The  tendencies  of  the  rationahstic  and  mystic 
currents  were  spirituahstic,  critical,  and  bent  on  inde- 
pendence, moral  and  political.  Thus  no  other  relation 
was  possible  between  the  old  and  the  new  types  of 
religious  thought  than  struggle.  The  struggle  set  in 
indeed,  and  after  half  a  century,  as  was  to  be  expected, 
it  resulted  in  the  triumph  of  the  nationalistic  type, 
which  is  already  known  by  us.  The  new  "heresies" 
were  completely  vanquished  and  driven  out  of  Russia; 
they  found  their  refuge  in  the  neighboring  countries 
of  Lithuania  and  Poland.  Every  spark  of  the  pre- 
Reformation  ideas  in  Russia  seemed  herewith  entirely 
extinguished. 

But  now  the  immediate  action  of  the  Reformation 
began  to  be  felt.  In  Moscow  this  new  current  of 
religious  ideas  succeeded  the  former  one  almost  with- 
out interruption  as  early  as  the  middle  of  the  six- 
teenth century.  The  old  "heresy,"  imported  from  the 
Orthodox  East,  from  Constantinople  and  Athos,  here 
came  into  contact  with  the  new  heresy,  coming  from 
the  German  West.  The  German  religion  was  then 
supposed  in  Moscow  to  be  still  Roman  Catholic,  be- 
cause nothing  was  known  here  as  yet  about  the  Ref- 
ormation. In  fact,  a  Russian  officer,  Matthias  Bash- 
kin,  was  condemned  by  a  council  of  bishops  in  Moscow 
in  1554  as  an  adherent  of  the  "Latin  heresy,"  though 
his  doctrine  was  entirely  evangelical  and  had  been 
learned  from  a  Protestant  physician  coming  from 
Lithuania.  This  early  evangelist  of  Moscow  professed 
that  there  is  no  transsubstantiation ;    that  the  church 


THE  RELIGIOUS  TRADITION  105 

does  not  consist  of  the  building,  but  of  the  gathering 
together  of  the  faithful;  that  images  of  saints  are 
wretched  idols;  that  there  are  no  confession  and  no 
remission  of  sins  unless  you  actually  desist  from 
sinning;  that  prayer  must  be  addressed  to  one  God, 
the  Father;  that  the  traditions  of  the  holy  Fathers 
were  mere  fables;  that  the  resolutions  of  the  ecu- 
menical councils  were  arbitrary ;  that  one  must  believe 
in  the  gospel  alone.  None  of  these  doctrines  found 
any  further  echo  in  Moscow.  We  may  understand 
why  if  we  consider  that  even  in  the  second  half  of  the 
same  century  the  Tsar  John  IV.  himself — who  was 
much  interested  in  religious  questions,  and  who  wished 
really  to  know  what  the  Protestant  religion  was — did 
not  find  a  better  way  to  satisfy  his  desire  than  asking  a 
Protestant  pastor  "how  they  performed  the  rite  of 
divine  service,  how  the  priests  entered  into  the  church 
and  put  on  vestments,  what  they  sang  during  the  mass 
and  how  they  brought  it  to  a  close,  whether  they  rang 
the  bells  in  the  same  way  every  day,  or  whether  per- 
haps they  rang  differently  on  great  feast  days  of  our 
Lord."  The  Tsar  had  evidently  not  the  least  notion 
that  to  answer  these  questions  was  not  to  inform 
him  what  the  essence  of  Protestantism  was.  He  simply 
did  not  know  how  to  ask  and  what  to  ask  about.  Thus 
the  very  essence  of  the  new  conception  of  religion 
remained  wholly  incomprehensible  to  the  Russians  of 
the  sixteenth  century.  Therefore  the  European  Re- 
formation could  not  strike  root  in  Moscow  at  this  time. 
That  is  also  why  foreigners  were  then  permitted  to 
live  in  the  midst  of  the  Orthodox  population  without 
any  apprehension  of  danger. 


io6  RUSSIA  AND  ITS  CRISIS 

We  already  know^  that  the  situation  changed 
greatly  in  the  middle  of  the  seventeenth  century,  when 
the  foreign  inhabitants  were  relegated  to  the  confines 
of  the  city.  This  marks  also  the  time  when  foreign 
religious  belief  began  to  influence  the  Russian  popula- 
tion. The  soil  was  now  more  ready  for  the  seed,  and 
thus,  in  the  second  half,  or  rather  at  the  end,  of  the 
seventeenth  century,  the  first  original  movements  of 
an  evangelical  and  spiritual  character  appeared  in 
Russia. 

We  must  recollect  that  this  was  just  at  the  moment 
when  the  separation  of  the  radicals — the  "Priestless" — 
from  the  bulk  of  the  "Old-believers''  began.^  We 
have  seen  that  it  was  the  time  of  general  agitation 
and  trouble:  the  second  advent  was  said  to  be  ap- 
proaching, and  Antichrist  was  expected  to  come.  The 
end  of  the  world  was  foretold  for  the  year  1691.  The 
doctrine  of  voluntary  death  and  martyrdom  was  ar- 
dently propagated  among  those  most  inclined  to  reli- 
gious emotion.  Such  were  the  conditions  under  which 
the  ordinary  concomitant  of  religious  emotionalism, 
prophctism,  appeared.  Men  were  seen  to  fall  into 
trances  and  to  deliver  revelations.  "The  Holy  Spirit 
talks  through  us,"  they  asserted. 

Such,  then,  was  the  origin  of  the  first  Russian  sect 
of  spiritual  Christians.  They  called  themselves  "Men 
of  God,"  or  plainly  "Christs;"  later  on  this  name  was 
altered  to  "HIeests,"  with  a  meaning  something  like 
"Flagellants."  The  reason  for  their  appearance  they 
explained  in  a  legend  about  the  founder  of  the  sect. 
There  was  once  an  old  and  wise  man,  the  legend  runs, 

'See  p.  37.  *  See  pp.  95,  96. 


THE  RELIGIOUS  TRADITION  107 

named  Daneelo  Fillippitch,  who  was  studying  the  ques- 
tion which  were  the  true  books — the  "old"  or  the 
"new."^  This  question  Daneelo  Fillippitch  resolved 
in  a  radical  way.  There  was  no  need  either  of  new  or 
of  old  books.  The  only  book  wanted  for  salvation 
was  a  "living"  one — the  Holy  Spirit  himself.  So  he 
gathered  all  his  books  and  threw  them  into  a  river. 
God's  men  afterwards  assembled  and  resolved  to  send 
wise  men  to  ask  that  God  himself  might  come  to  the 
earth.  And  a  chariot  of  fire  rolled  down  from  the 
clouds,  and  God  was  in  it,  and  he  took  up  his  abode  in 
the  sanctified  body  of  Daneelo  Fillippitch.  You  may 
conclude  from  this  legend  that  the  divine  idea  was  not 
quite  comfortably  lodged  in  the  rather  heavy  mind  of 
Daneelo  Fillippitch  and  his  followers.  They  did  not 
grasp  satisfactorily  the  notion  of  living  inspiration. 
Hence  the  whole  of  their  teaching  makes  up  a  curious 
mixture  of  the  old  and  the  new.  To  become  inspired, 
for  instance,  a  peculiar  method  is  used — a  method 
entirely  outward  and  physiological.  The  Hleests 
gather  in  circles,  in  a  private  room,  and  perform  a 
kind  of  dance  to  the  tune  of  peculiar  songs  of  their 
own.  The  time  of  the  song  grows  gradually  quicker 
and  quicker,  and  also  the  movements  of  the  choir. 
Some  people,  more  fit  for  inspiration,  turn  like  der- 
vishes in  the  midst  of  the  circle,  in  a  whirling  dance, 
until  they  fall  on  the  floor  wholly  exhausted  and  begin 
to  vociferate  some  incoherent  words  which  are  taken 
for  a  prophecy.  Such  people  as  can  "turn  in  the 
circle"  are  sure  to  possess  the  Spirit;  they  form  a 
higher  rank  of  the  community — the  "prophets"   and 

'  See  p.  79,  Neekon's  reform. 


io8  RUSSIA  AND  ITS  CRISIS 

"prophetesses."  The  other  members  remain  in  a  stage 
of  preparation.  There  is  a  "Christ"  at  the  head  of 
every  community — or  "ship"  as  it  is  called — and  a 
"Mother  of  God,"  too,  at  his  side.  Many  features  in 
rite  and  teaching  are  taken  directly  from  the  "Old- 
believers,"  from  whose  number  the  Hleests  issued. 
The  assemblies  regularly  end  in  orgies  which  remind 
us  of  pagan  rites;  the  notion  of  Christian  love  being 
interpreted  in  a  rather  wide  sense. 

We  shall  not  dwell  on  a  reaction  against  the  last- 
mentioned  feature,  which  gave  origin,  in  the  middle 
of  the  eighteenth  century,  to  an  ascetic  sect  of  "Castra- 
toes"  (Skoptsce).  This,  indeed,  was  no  step  further 
in  the  development  of  the  spiritualistic  belief.  And 
before  we  take  up  the  consideration  of  such  sects  as 
really  achieved  progress,  let  us  look  back  to  the  end 
of  the  seventeenth  century,  when  the  Hleests  first 
appeared.  We  have  to  trace  there  also  another  origin 
— that  of  the  Russian  evangelical  creed. 

We  have  just  seen  that  the  origin  of  the  Hleests 
was  popular,  and  that  by  this  origin  they  are  imme- 
diately connected  with  the  extremest  party  of  the  "Old- 
believers."  The  origin  and  the  affiliation  of  Russian 
evangelicism  are  quite  otherwise.  The  surroundings 
in  which  evangelistic  doctrine  first  struck  root  were 
entirely  different  from  the  popular  gatherings  of  "Old- 
believers"  waiting  for  the  day  of  judgment;  it  was 
in  the  much  more  refined  atmosphere  of  the  first  Rus- 
sian academy  for  theological  studies,  which  had  just 
been  founded  in  Moscow  in  the  year  1687.  Of  course, 
no  foreign  theology  was  to  be  taught  there.  Roman 
Catholic,  Lutheran,  and  Calvinistic  books  on  religion 


THE  RELIGIOUS  TRADITION  109 

were  rigorously  forbidden,  and  lectures  were  to  be 
delivered  in  strict  accordance  with  the  Greek  doctrine 
of  faith.  Nevertheless,  discussions  about  the  different 
denominations  constantly  took  place  in  the  school ;  and 
thus  the  differences  in  religious  rite  and  belief  became 
current  topics  of  scholarly  controversy.  Presently, 
however,  these  discussions  passed  beyond  the  walls  of 
the  academy.  In  connection  with  them  an  amateur 
debating  club  gathered  around  a  Muscovite  free- 
thinker, Demetrius  Tvereetinov,  and  along  with  the 
discussions  the  head  of  the  circle  undertook  a  work  of 
formal  propaganda.  Tvereetinov  was  assisted  in  this 
propaganda  by  a  change  in  the  official  position  of 
religion  which  occurred  at  the  time  of  Peter  the  Great. 
"Thanks  to  God,"  Tvereetinov  would  say,  "now  every- 
body is  free  in  Moscow  to  believe  w'hatever  faith  he 
chooses."  In  fact,  contemporaries  witness  that  Tveree- 
tinov and  his  circle  "professed  their  opinions  as  boldly 
as  if  they  were  foreigners."  This  was  so,  however, 
only  for  some  dozen  years;  for  in  1714  the  religious 
opinions  of  the  circle  were  condemned  by  a  council,  and 
the  "heretics"  w^ere  obliged  to  renounce  their  opinions. 
The  only  one  among  them  who  did  not  acquiesce  in 
this  renunciation  was  burned  alive.  But  Tvereetinov's 
teachings  were  not  extinguished  with  his  renunciation. 
From  this  time  on,  evangelistic  opinions  have  always 
existed  in  Russia. 

To  what  extent,  however,  the  term  "evangelical" 
may  be  used  concerning  Tvereetinov's  body  of  doctrine 
may  be  doubted.  The  term  was,  of  course,  his  own; 
but  his  opponents  w^ere  not  incorrect  when  they  ob- 
served that  "here  a  new  heresy  was  beginning,  worse 


no  RUSSIA  AND  ITS  CRISIS 

than  Lutheranism  or  Calvinism."  The  fact  is  that 
Russian  evangelicism,  from  its  first  appearance  in  the 
sixteenth  century,  seems  to  have  cherished  some  opin- 
ions that  remind  one  rather  of  Unitarian  doctrines. 
The  influence  of  the  PoHsh  Socinians  may  account 
perhaps  for  this  pecuHarity.  You  will  remember  that 
the  Russian  "heretics"  of  the  sixteenth  century,  when 
condemned  by  the  Moscow  councils  in  1552-54,  had 
fled  over  the  western  frontier.*^  One  of  these  refugees, 
Theodosius  the  Squint-Eyed,  was  known  to  be  at  one 
with  the  Polish  Anti-trinitarians.  He  had  followers 
in  Russia,  and  his  teachings  were  refuted  in  Russian 
theological  tracts.  As  regards  the  followers,  their  fur- 
ther fate  is  quite  obscure;  but  the  teachings  were 
preserved  for  the  future  by  the  theological  refutations 
just  mentioned.  Thus  the  very  name  for  Russian 
evangelical  believers,  until  the  second  half  of  the  eigh- 
teenth century,  seems  to  have  been  borrowed  from 
controversial  tracts  against  Russian  "heretics"  of  the 
fifteenth  and  the  sixteenth  centuries.  These  heretics 
were  called  "Judaizers."  It  is  not  known  positively 
whether  the  name  alone  was  preserved,  or  whether 
there  existed,  from  the  end  of  the  fifteenth  century 
onward,  a  continuous  tradition  of  the  "heresy"  itself. 
In  the  last  case  Tvereetinov's  doctrine  must  have 
served  to  revive  this  tradition  of  heresy,  or  else  it  may 
even  have  laid  anew  the  foundations  of  evangelicism,  if 
before  the  end  of  the  seventeenth  century  evangelicism 
may  be  found  to  have  been  extinguished.  Anyhow, 
the  early  Russian  evangelists,  such  as  the  "Judaizers," 
the  "Seventh-day  Observers,"  were  now  all  adherents 

'  See  above,  p.   104. 


THE  RELIGIOUS  TRADITION  in 

of  Tvereetinov.  Tvereetinov's  "Extracts  from  the 
Holy  Writ"  served  them  as  a  catechism  and  a  gospel. 
These  extracts  were  systematically  arranged  by  Tver- 
eetinov under  different  headings,  in  accordance  with 
the  chief  points  of  evangelical  criticism.  Their  aim, 
though,  was  not  an  exposition  of  any  positive  doctrine, 
but  the  making  of  converts  by  the  refutation  of  errors 
in  the  orthodox  faith. 

Thus  both  the  spiritual  and  the  evangelical  currents 
of  Christian  thought  took  their  rise  in  Russia  at  the 
end  of  the  seventeenth  and  the  beginning  of  the  eigh- 
teenth centuries.  Their  teaching,  however,  did  not 
remain  unchanged.  Subsequently  both  currents,  about 
a  century  later,  profiting  by  the  comparative  freedom 
of  the  reign  of  Catherine  II.,  who  was  indifferent  to 
sectarianism,  and  by  that  of  Alexander  I.,  who  rather 
favored  it,  took  on  quite  a  new  form.  The  new  sect 
of  spiritual  Christians  that  now  was  developed  from 
the  Hleests  was  that  of  the  "Wrestlers  with  the  Spirit" 
(Dookhobortscc).  The  other  new  sect,  the  evangelical 
one,  that  was  also  developed  from  the  former — the 
"Judaizers" — under  the  influence  of  the  spiritual  sect 
just  mentioned,  took  the  name  of  the  "Milk-Drinkers" 
(Molokanee). 

The  Dookhobortsee  (or  "  Dookhobory  " )  are  par- 
ticularly interesting,  because  they  achieved  a  consider- 
able progress  in  the  spiritual  Christianity  of  Russia. 
Such  pagan  ways  and  rites  as  the  Hleests  performed  are 
entirely  eradicated  from  the  religious  practices  of  the 
"Wrestlers  with  the  Spirit."  No  whirlwind  dances, 
no  ecstatic  prophecy,  no  sensual  orgies,  can  be  found 
there.     At  the  same  time  the  religious  doctrine  is  con- 


112  RUSSIA  AND  ITS  CRISIS 

siderably  spiritualized.  There  is  no  hierarchical  dis- 
tinction like  that  which  existed  between  the  "prophets" 
of  the  Hleests  and  the  rest  of  the  congregation  longing 
for  inspiration.  Everybody  is  inspired;  everyone  is  a 
"son  of  God,"  and  as  such  possesses  Christ  in  his 
inmost  soul.  Such  were  all  souls  at  the  moment  they 
were  created  by  God.  But  a  part  of  them  had  sinned 
even  before  God  created  the  world.  Therefore  they 
were  cast  off  by  God  and  plunged  deep  into  the  flesh, 
the  matter,  which  is  the  very  element  of  sin.  To  free 
themselves  from  every  seduction  of  the  flesh — this  was, 
they  held,  the  only  way  to  revive  Christ  in  the  soul. 
Tlie  first  men  on  earth  still  were  so  perfect  that  they 
had  no  need  of  outward  rules  or  rites  for  this  purpose. 
But  in  measure  as  the  flesh  prevailed,  prescriptions 
of  state  and  church  were  felt  to  be  necessary.  Then 
also  the  divisions  of  churches  began.  As  yet,  how- 
ever, all  these  authorities,  laws,  and  doctrines  were 
no  more  than  palliatives,  powerless  to  restrain  the 
"wickedness  of  the  wicked."  For  the  righteous,  on 
the  other  hand,  even  such  restrictions  were  not  at  all 
necessary.  "In  whose  hearts  the  Sun  of  eternal  truth 
has  risen  in  midday  brightness,  there  moon  and  stars 
have  no  more  light.  For  the  children  of  God,  tsars 
and  authorities  and  every  human  law  are  truly  super- 
fluous. Through  Jesus  Christ  their  will  is  made  free 
from  any  law:  no  law  is  given  for  the  righteous." 
No  Holy  Writ  or  sacraments  or  rite  whatever  can 
bind  the  sons  of  God;  for  them  such  things  are  mere 
"signs"  and  "images,"  having  only  a  figurative,  an 
emblematic  sense.  Churches  of  every  denomination 
are  equall}^  open  to  them.     Superior  to  any  particular 


THE  RELIGIOUS  TRADITION  113 

church,  they  feel  also  superior  to  the  state.  Like 
Quakers  they  profess  the  unlawfulness  of  war  and  of 
oaths  for  Christians.  You  know,  I  suppose,  what 
extreme  consequences  of  Christian  anarchism  were 
drawn  from  these  general  ideas  of  the  "Wrestlers  with 
the  Spirit"  when  their  doctrine  was  recently  renovated 
by  the  teachings  of  Leo  Tolstoy.  In  Canada  they  have 
just  tried  to  realize  their  social  Utopia,  which  was  per- 
haps more  easy  to  understand  in  the  days  of  George 
Fox  and  Roger  Williams  than  it  is  in  our  own  time."^ 

In  the  year  1818  two  Quakers,  William  Allen  and 
Stephen  Grellet,  saw  the  colonies  of  the  "Wrestlers 
with  the  Spirit"  and  had  no  difficulty  in  recognizing 
how  near  the  doctrine  of  the  Dookhobortsee  was  to 
their  own.  They  visited  also  the  neighboring  colonies 
of  the  Molokanee  (the  "Drinkers  of  Milk")  who,  as 
we  have  seen,  were  a  new  evangelical  sect,  formed, 
under  the  influence  of  the  Dookhobortsee,  out  of  evan- 
gelical elements  formerly  existing  in  Russia.^ 

The  chief  merit  of  this  new  sect  was,  indeed,  the 
unification  of  many  sects,  vaguely  evangelical,  and 
also  the  formulating  of  a  more  definite,  positive  doc- 
trine, which  completed  and  took  the  place  of  the  rather 
negative  criticisms  of  Tvereetinov's  "Extracts  from 
the  Bible."  The  contents  of  their  new  creed,  quite 
different  from  that  of  the  Dookhobortsee  and  wholly 
founded  on  Scripture,  are  very  well  epitomized  by  the 
two  Quakers  just  mentioned.  We  borrow  the  follow- 
ing passage  from  a  report  sent  by  William  Allen  to  the 
emperor  (1819)  : 

They  believe  in  the  divine  authority  of  the  Holy  Scriptures, 
in  the  deity  of  our  Lord  and  Savior,  and  in  the  influence  of  the 
'See  p.   119.  "See  p.  iii. 


114  RUSSIA  AND  ITS  CRISIS 

Holy  Spirit,  as  fully  as  any  Christians  whom  we  ever  met  with. 
They  believe  it  their  duty  to  abstain  from  all  ceremonies,  and 
think  that  the  only  acceptable  worship  is  that  performed  "in 
spirit  and  in  truth."  They  collect  their  families  two  or  three 
times  a  day  to  hear  the  Scriptures  read,  and  abstain  from  secular 
employment  on  the  first  day  of  the  week,  called  Sunday,  con- 
sidering it  their  duty  to  appropriate  this  day  to  religious  exer- 
cises. Their  marriages  are  performed  with  solemnity  in  their 
public  meetings,  and  the  parties  promise  to  be  faithful  to  each 
other  during  life.  They  believe  that  the  only  true  baptism  is  that 
of  Christ  with  the  Spirit,  and  that  the  water  baptism  of  John 
is  not  now  necessary;  and  they  consider  that  the  true  com- 
munion is  altogether  of  a  spiritual  nature,  and  make  use  of  no 
outward  ceremony.  In  their  meetings  for  worship  they  sing 
psalms,  and  several  of  those  who  are  esteemed  by  the  rest  as 
more  pious  read  to  the  others,  in  turn.  They  have  no  appointed 
preachers,  but  anyone  who  feels  himself  properly  qualified, 
through  the  power  of  the  Divine  Infiuence  upon  the  mind,  may 
expound  and  speak  to  edification ;  they,  however,  consider  that 
it  should  never  be  done  for  hire,  or  from  any  worldly  motive. 

They  believe  that  a  true  Christian  can  never  harbor  revenge, 
and  they  think  it  their  duty  rather  to  suffer  wrong  than  to  seek 
to  avenge  it;  if  any  differences  arise,  they  are  settled  among 
themselves,  and  not  brought  to  the  tribunals. 

Some  among  them  are  considered  as  elders,  and  though  it 
does  not  appear  that  they  are  regularly  appointed,  yet  those  who 
are  most  eminent  for  their  piety  are  regarded  as  such,  and  it  is 
their  duty,  when  any  of  the  fraternity  are  ill,  to  visit  them,  and 
if  able  to  do  so,  to  offer  them  advice,  or  afford  them  comfort. 
No  particular  ceremony  is  observed  at  their  burial,  but  they  sing 
a  psalm. 

If  the  moral  conduct  of  anyone  does  not  correspond  with  his 
profession,  he  is  tenderly  exhorted,  and  much  labor  is  bestowed 
upon  him;  but  if  they  judge  that  he  cannot  be  reclaimed,  he  is 
dismissed  from  the  society.  With  respect  to  the  poor  among 
them,  they  deem  it  Christian  duty  to  take  care  of,  and  support 
each  other.     It  appears  that  they  have  no  instance  among  them 


THE  RELIGIOUS  TRADITION  115 

of  children  acting  irreverently  towards  their  parents,  and  they 
are  very  careful  to  have  them  instructed  in  reading  and  writing. 

Another  quotation,  from  the  Memoirs  of  Stephen 
Grellet,  who  journeyed  together  with  Wilham  Allen, 
points  out  some  new  features,  particularly  of  social 
teachings,  of  the  Molokanee,  and  also  their  similarity 
to  the  Quakers : 

Previous  to  our  going  to  the  meeting  with  the  Spiritual 
Christians,  we  prepared  a  list  of  the  principal  subjects  respecting 
which  we  wished  to  inquire  of  them.  They  were  very  free  to 
give  us  every  information  we  asked  for,  and  they  did  it  in  few 
words,  accompanied,  generally,  with  some  Scripture  quotations 
as  their  reasons  for  believing  or  acting  as  they  did;  these  were 
so  much  to  the  purpose  that  one  acquainted  with  Friends'  writ- 
ings might  conclude  that  they  had  selected  from  them  the  most 
clear  and  appropriate  passages  to  support  their  several  testi- 
monies, etc."  On  all  the  cardinal  points  of  the  Christian  religion, 
the  fall  of  man,  salvation  by  Christ  through  faith,  the  meritorious 
death  of  Christ,  his  resurrection,  ascension,  etc.,  their  views  are 
very  clear;  also  lespecting  the  influence  of  the  Holy  Spirit, 
worship,  ministry,  baptjsm,  the  supper,  oaths,  etc.,  etc.,  we  might 
suppose  they  were  thoroughly  acquainted  with  our  religious 
society,  but  they  had  never  heard  of  us,  nor  of  any  people  that 
profess  as  they  do.  Respecting  war,  however,  their  views  are 
not  entirely  clear,  and  yet  many  among  us  may  learn  from  them ; 
they  said,  "War  is  a  subject  that  we  have  not  yet  been  able 
fully  to  understand,  so  as  to  reconcile  Scripture  with  Scripture; 
we  are  commanded  to  obey  our  rulers,  magistrates,  etc.,  for  con- 
science' sake;  and  again,  we  are  enjoined  to  love  our  enemies, 
not  to  avenge  ourselves,  to  render  good  for  evil ;    therefore,  we 

°  The  Molokanee  in  their  answers  to  Grellet,  used  doubtless  a 
selection  from  the  Holy  Scripture  which  took  the  place  of  Tver- 
eetinov's  "  Extracts  "  and  which  until  now  formed  their  chief  source 
of  religious  knowledge.  This  selection  is  called  "Ritual,"  because  the 
selections  are  classified  here  under  the  headings  of  different  Christian 
rites. 


ii6  RUSSIA  AND  ITS  CRISIS 

cannot  see  fully  how  we  can  refuse  obedience  to  the  laws  that 
require  our  young  people  to  join  the  army;  but  in  all  matters 
respecting  ourselves,  we  endeavor  to  act  faithfully  as  the  gospel 
requires ;  we  have  never  any  lawsuits ;  for  if  anybody  smites  us 
on  the  one  cheek,  we  turn  to  him  the  other ;  if  he  takes  away  any 
part  of  our  property,  we  bear  it  patiently,  we  give  to  him  that 
asketh,  and  lend  to  him  that  borrows,  not  asking  it  back  again, 
and  in  all  these  things  the  Lord  blesses  us ;  the  Lord  is  very 
good  also  to  our  young  men ;  for  though  several  of  them  have 
been  taken  to  the  army,  not  one  of  them  has  actually  borne  arms ; 
for,  our  principles  being  known,  they  have  very  soon  been  placed 
in  offices  of  trust,  such  as  attending  to  the  provisions  of  the 
army,  or  something  of  that  sort."  Their  ministers  are  acknowl- 
edged in  much  the  same  way  as  ours,  and,  like  us,  they  consider 
that  their  only  and  their  best  reward  is  the  dear  Savior's  appro- 
bation; therefore,  they  receive  no  kind  of  salary.  They  use  the 
Slavonian  Bible;  few  of  them,  however,  can  read;  but  those 
who  can,  read  to  the  others,  and  these  from  memory  teach  the 
children,  so  that  their  young  people  are  very  ready  in  quoting  the 
Scriptures  correctly.  They  pointed  out  to  us  the  great  dis- 
tinction there  is  between  them  and  the  Dookhobortsee.  The  latter 
deny  the  authority  of  the  Scriptures ;  they  deny  the  divinity  of 
our  Lord  Jesus  Christ ;  the  offering  up  of  himself  a  sacrifice 
for  sin  on  Calvary  and  salvation  by  faith  in  him. 

These  rather  long  quotations  show  at  first  hand 
how  purified  the  hfe  and  the  teachings  of  the  Russian 
evangehcals  were  a  hundred  years  ago,  and  a  hundred 
years  after  Russian  evangehcism  took  its  rise. 

We  come  now  to  the  nineteenth  century.  Never 
was  rehgious  hfe  in  Russia  more  animated,  and  never 
was  the  official  church  more  lifeless  and  powerless  in 
its  spiritual  struggle  against  "heresies."  With  the 
ancient  schism  of  the  "Old-believers"  the  church  had 
long  since  come  to  terms;  the  parish  priests  generally 
derived   profits   from   its   existence,    by   delivering   to 


THE  RELIGIOUS  TRADITION  117 

"Old-believers"  certificates  for  the  performance  of 
Orthodox  rites  and  sacraments.  Thus  they  were  inter- 
ested in  concealing  schismatics  from  the  persecution 
of  the  government.  With  the  new  sects  the  case  was 
quite  different.  With  the  single  exception  of  the 
Hleests,  the  sectarians  were  eager  to  testify  to  their 
faith  and  gave  no  bribes  to  the  parish  clergy.  En- 
dowed with  a  fresh  spirit  of  proselytism,  they  made 
many  converts,  and  so  diminished  the  number  of  the 
Orthodox  parishioners.  Their  very  teaching  seemed 
infinitely  more  revolutionary  for  the  church  than  were 
the  doctrines  of  the  "Old-believers."  Therefore,  the 
clergy  had  now  to  set  at  work  proving  that  for  the 
state,  too,  sectarian  doctrines  were  particularly  dan- 
gerous. And  they  did  not  appeal  in  vain  to  the  secular 
arm.  A  persecution  began,  systematic  and  relentless 
as  it  never  had  been  before.  But.  in  spite  of  perse- 
cution, the  religious  movement  was  always  growing, 
particularly  in  the  second  half  of  the  century.  The 
growth  manifested  itself,  first,  in  a  considerable  in- 
crease of  adherents  of  the  old  sects;  secondly,  in  a 
continual  development  of  their  doctrines;  and,  thirdly, 
in  the  appearance  of  new  sects.  The  results  of  this 
evolution  are  at  the  present  time  so  varied  and  so 
continuously  changing  that  I  cannot  give  you  here 
even  an  approximate  sketch  of  them.  I  can  only  point 
out  the  chief  changes  which  the  sects  already  known  to 
you  have  undergone,  and  mention  some  of  the  most 
important  which  have  recently  appeared. 

The  Hleests  did  not  remain  unchanged  after  the 
development  from  them  of  a  more  perfect  type  of 
spiritual  Christianity — the  "Wrestlers  with  the  Spirit." 


ii8  RUSSIA  AND  ITS  CRISIS 

There  was  no  lack  of  attempt  on  their  part  to  purify 
their  rite,  to  heighten  the  quaHty  of  inspiration,  and  to 
deepen  its  mystical  sense ;  while  at  the  same  time  they 
endeavored  to  preserve  to  the  sect  such  practical  ways 
of  receiving  the  spirit  as  the  too  prosaic  doctrine  of 
the  "Wrestlers  with  the  Spirit"  had  completely  got 
rid  of.  As  concerns  their  former  rite,  many  Hleests 
desisted  from  the  practice  of  ending  their  whirling 
dances  with  fieshly  orgies,  and  they  regulated,  in  a 
certain  measure,  their  habits  of  "spiritual  love."  Some 
of  them  even  ceased  to  use  any  artificial  ways  what- 
ever for  eliciting  the  voice  of  the  spirit  in  the  soul. 
The  spirit  was  to  be  got,  as  was  claimed  by  a  new 
theory,  by  a  long  series  of  spiritual  exertions,  implying 
complete  "self-negation,"  a  "surrender  of  self  to  the 
will  of  God,"  a  "self-burial"  in  Christ.  Only  after 
such  complete  mortification  of  flesh  and  will  an  in- 
ternal voice  began  to  be  felt,  commanding  man's 
actions  independently  of  his  own  will.  This  is  the 
"mysterious  resurrection"  which  follows  the  "mys- 
terious death."  The  inward  dictation  of  the  spirit 
makes  the  will  free  from  any  command  of  the  law : 
such  is  the  necessary  conclusion  of  Antinomianism  of 
every  time  and  nation. 

Unlike  the  Hleests,  the  life  and  doctrine  of  the 
"Wrestlers  with  the  Spirit"  started  from  so  high  a 
point  that  it  has  lowered  in  the  course  of  the  nineteenth 
century.  Their  abstract  teaching  could  not  be  grasped 
by  undeveloped  minds,  and  so  the  sect  was  obliged  to 
recur  to  the  help  of  outward  symbols  and  figurative 
expressions ;  such,  for  instance,  was  the  kind  of  short 
catechism   compiled   for .  their   general   instruction   in 


THE  RELIGIOUS  TRADITION  119 

faith.  As  concerns  their  hfe,  they  were  ruled  rather 
arbitrarily  by  a  dynasty  of  "  Christs,"  whose  dignity 
and  vocation  were  supposed  to  pass  regularly  from 
father  to  son.  The  last  of  this  dynasty,  the  "Mother 
of  God,"  Lukairya,  died  in  the  year  1886,  and  her 
heirs  have  appropriated  as  their  own  the  collective 
property  of  the  "Wrestlers  with  the  Spirit."  This 
served  as  a  signal  for  a  religious  awakening.  The 
sectarians  considered  their  loss  as  a  punishment  for 
their  sins,  and  so  resolved  to  live  thenceforward  "ac- 
cording to  freedom  and  conscience."  Just  then  they 
were  strongly  influenced  by  the  Tolstoyan  doctrine  of 
"non-interference  with  evil."  The  most  fervent  imme- 
diately began  to  practice  their  new  teaching.  They 
changed  their  name  for  a  new  one — that  of  "All- 
brethren" — refused  military  service,  ceased  to  pay 
duties  which  might  serve  to  "hire  other  people  to  kill 
men."  They  were  then  exiled — for  the  third  time 
during  a  century — to  the  confines  of  the  empire,  and 
were  transported  from  there,  with  the  help  of  Tolstoy 
and  his  followers,  to  Canada.  In  Canada  they  tried 
to  ward  off  every  interference  of  the  state  in  their 
affairs.  To  this  end  they  refused  to  acknowledge  the 
possession  of  landed  property,  to  register  births  and 
marriages,  and  generally  to  recognize  any  state  law. 
Because  they  wished  to  "be  directed  exclusively  by 
the  dictates  of  their  own  conscience,"  they  con- 
sidered every  outward  rule  "murderous  to  life."  Be- 
ing checked,  by  a  positive  refusal  on  the  part  of  the 
Canadian  authorities  to  consider  their  point  of  view, 
they  addressed  themselves  "to  all  men,  brethren  of 
all  countries,"  asking  to  be  told  whether  there  is  to  be 


120  RUSSIA  AND  ITS  CRISIS 

found  anywhere  a  country  or  a  society  where  they 
would  be  tolerated.  After  some  fruitless  waiting  for 
an  answer,  the  majority  yielded  to  the  requests  of  the 
authorities ;  but  the  minority,  supported  in  their  resolu- 
tion to  resist  by  Tolstoy  himself,  worked  up  their 
spirits  to  a  state  of  mystic  exaltation,  and  so  exhibited 
to  the  puzzled  Americans  the  mediaeval  show  of  a 
crowd  proceeding,  with  a  "John  the  Baptist"  at  its 
head,  in  search  of  Christ's  kingdom.  But  to  do  the 
sect  full  justice,  one  must  remember  that  they  are 
such  only  in  moments  of  high  religious  emotion. 
From  time  to  time  such  emotions  have  swept  like 
epidemics  through  Russia  itself.  In  quieter  times, 
however,  the  impression  that  our  sectarians  leave  on 
the  observer  is  entirely  different.  It  is  like  what  we 
saw  in  the  descriptions  of  Allen  and  Grellet.  By  the 
high  moral  tone  which  the  sectarians  exhibit  in  their 
family  life  and  social  intercourse,  by  the  strict  observ- 
ance of  their  pledged  word,  by  the  rigid  keeping  of 
their  obligations  toward  their  fellow-men,  by  their 
readiness  to  help  and  sympathize  both  with  outsiders 
and  with  their  brethren  in  the  faith,  they  present 
exactly  the  opposite  to  what  I  described  in  my  first 
chapter  as  the  average  Russian  type.  Theirs  is  a 
higher  social  type — the  type  of  the  Russian  of  the 
future. 

Of  the  sects  of  the  eighteenth  century  there  remain 
to  be  spoken  of  the  Molokanee,  the  "Drinkers  of  Milk." 
As  they  were  the  most  moderate,  and  as  their  doctrine 
was  the  most  definitely  formulated  in  harmony  with 
the  Bible  view  of  the  early  apostolic  church,  they  have 
changed  less  during  the  nineteenth  century  than  other 


THE  RELIGIOUS  TRADITION  121 

sectarians.  But  still  the  general  drift  of  religious  cur- 
rents did  not  leave  them  untouched.  In  the  same  wise 
as  they  themselves  had  been  recast  into  a  new  sect, 
from  many  congenial  elements  which  had  previously 
existed,  they  in  their  turn  served  as  a  ready  material 
for  the  building  of  more  advanced  sects  of  a  kindred 
spirit.  Two  new  sects  appeared  about  the  middle  of 
the  nineteenth  century,  closely  related  to  each  other 
in  the  original  character  of  their  inspiration,  but 
gravitating  to  quite  different  central  ideas,  either 
spiritual  or  evangelical.  One  was  called  the  "Shalo- 
poots,"  the  "Good-for-Nothing  Men."  The  Shalopoots 
shared  the  purified  and  spiritualized  doctrine  of  the 
Hleests;  at  the  same  time  they  adopted  (or  pre- 
served) the  "Ritual"  or  catechism  of  the  "Drinkers  of 
Milk."  Their  social  doctrine  was  that  of  collectivism; 
their  rural  economy  was  practically  communistic.  In 
general,  they  preserved  the  character  of  spiritual 
Christianity. 

The  other  sect  was  called  by  a  German  name, 
"Stundists,"  which  points  out  its  foreign  origin.  It 
originated,  indeed,  amidst  German  colonists  of  the 
Mennonite  denomination.  In  the  middle  of  the  nine- 
teenth century  a  religious  fermentation  began  among 
the  Mennonites,  and  it  was  felt  immediately  among 
their  Russian  neighbors.  In  its  origin  the  movement 
was  also  spiritual,  and  even  mystical.  At  the  time, 
however,  strong  influence  of  Baptist  preachers  began, 
which  gave  to  the  movement  rather  an  evangelical  char- 
acter. Baptist  missionaries  and  learned  Baptist  presby- 
ters tried  to  unify  and  organize  the  Russian  Stundists, 
and  for  the  most  part  succeeded  in  their  attempt,  the 


122  RUSSIA  AND  ITS  CRISIS 

more  easily  as  the  profession  of  the  Baptist  faith  was  a 
means  of  escaping  persecution  by  the  state.^^     Never- 
theless,  plenty  of  differences  still  exist  in  the  little 
groups  of  the  Stunclists,  as  regards  questions  of  rite 
and    hierarchy,    views    about    the    sacraments,    about 
Scripture,   and   so   on.     The   Baptist   point   of   view 
appears  to  be  intermediate  between  the  extremes  of 
the    various    existing    opinions    of    these    sectarians. 
Whether  it  will  prevail  depends,  in  large  measure,  on 
the  further  exertions  of  the  Baptist  missionaries  from 
abroad.     At  all  events,  it  is  clear  that  the  sect  will 
remain  essentially  evangelical.     Upon  this  condition 
the  prospects  of  its  further  expansion  are  dependent, 
as  there  exists   already   another   evangelical   sect,   of 
recent  origin,  which  is  ready  to  unite  with  the  Stund- 
ists.     This  last  sect   was   founded   some  twenty-five 
years  ago  in  the  northern  part  of  Russia,  while  Stund- 
ism  was  spreading  in  the  south.     They  were  called 
"Pashkovists,"  from  the  name  of  the  founder  of  the 
sect.   Colonel   Pashkov,   who  belonged  to  the  higher 
society  of  Petersburg  and  had  undergone  the  influence 
of  Lord  Redstock's  preaching  in  the  year  1874.     The 
central,  and  nearly  the  only,  doctrine  of  the  Pashkovists 
is  justification  by   faith,   with   its  antinomian   conse- 
quences.    Thus  even  here,  as  we  see — in  a  doctrine 
purely  evangelical — there  is  a  tendency  to  spiritualistic 
conclusions.     And  this  tendency  appears  more  clearly 
as  the  teaching  spreads  among  the  people  from  its 
original  center  of  educated  society. 

Thus,  wherever  we  look  we  always  find  that  the 
process  of  Russian  reformation  is  far   from  having 

^"  See  below,  p.  126. 


TFIE  RELIGIOUS  TRADITION  123 

reached  definitive  results.  The  last  half-century  added 
more  perhaps  to  the  spread  of  the  movement  than 
centuries  of  former  history.  It  seethes  and  boils  under 
the  seemingly  placid  surface  of  the  Russian  official 
religion;  there  are  many  springs  which  spout  hot 
currents  from  the  bottom.  As  yet,  however,  they  are 
isolated,  and  so  act  separately.  Their  action  is  dis- 
sipated and  seems  to  be  almost  entirely  lost  in  the 
standing  water  that  surrounds  them.  Still,  by  degrees, 
the  temperature  of  the  water  is  rising.  Is  the  time 
soon  to  come  when  the  ebullition  will  become  general  ? 

That  is  what  our  "home  mission"  foretold  longf 
since  and  is  still  afraid  of.  Accordingly,  it  cries  and 
vociferates  for  prompt  measures  to  be  taken  by  the 
state,  in  order  that  the  established  church  may  be 
saved  from  the  new  religious  spirit.  Morally  power- 
less, it  appeals  to  material  force.  And  material  force 
has  been  used  for  its  protection;  it  is  still  used  to  a 
degree  quite  incompatible  with  any  claim  to  civiliza- 
tion. Were  it  not  for  that  reason,  Russian  reformation 
would  have  been  an  accomplished  fact.  This  is  not 
at  all  my  personal  supposition;  the  apprehension  of 
this  result,  as  a  necessary  consequence  of  any  religious 
tolerance,  is'  loudly  outspoken  by  the  representatives 
and  apologists  of  the  established  church.  In  fact,  this 
apprehension  it  is  that  makes  persecution  so  relentless 
and  brings  the  state  authorities  to  the  head  of  the 
persecution. 

I  know,  of  course,  that,  in  consequence  of  a  re- 
cently published  manifesto,  London  newspapers  in- 
formed their  readers  that  "the  Tsar  grants  religious 
freedom  to  his  subjects."     This  view  seems  to  have 


124  RUSSIA  AND  ITS  CRISIS 

found  its  way  to  America  also,  if  I  may  judge  by  an 
article  in  the  Chautauquan.  It  is  affirmed  there  that 
The  recent  decrees  of  the  Tsar  on  the  subject  of  religion 
undertake  to  estabUsh  absolute  freedom  of  worship  throughout 
the  empire.  They  thus  not  only  give  the  nonconformists  the 
rights  for  which  they  have  long  been  contending,  but  mark  out 
a  broad  and  liberal  policy  of  the  state  in  religious  matters  which 
certainly  augurs  well  for  the  country. 

I  entirely  agree  with  the  author  as  to  the  apprecia- 
tion of  the  policy  in  question ;  and  I  am  quite  sure  that 
this  policy  will  sooner  or  later  be  adopted.     But  un- 
happily this  is  not  yet  the  case;   and  the  manifesto  in 
question  actually  says  quite  the  opposite  to  what  it  was 
supposed  to  say.     It  affirms  that  existing  fundamental 
laws  are  quite  sufficient  to  preserve  religious  tolerance ; 
and  that  to  this  effect  "authorities  will  be  obliged  to 
observe  the   fundamental   law."     This  is   something, 
because  until  now  religious  persecution  did  not  even 
take  care  of  the  existing  law;    a  ministerial  circular, 
or  even  an  edict  of  a  local  governor,  was  quite  suffi- 
cient to  inaugurate  in  any  given  locality — or  in  the 
whole  empire — the  reign  of  terror  for  nonconformists. 
A  body  of  such  circulars  is  still  in  action,  though  even 
the   Petersburg   senate   some  twenty   years   ago   pro- 
tested against  their  having  any  legal  power.     But  the 
chief  obstacle  to  the  introduction   of  a  new   era   of 
tolerance  is  quite  other ;   namely,  that  even  the  funda- 
mental laws  of  Russia  do  not  at  all  assure  the  subjects 
any  religious  freedom.     To  be  more  accurate,  the  sort 
of  religious  freedom  they  give  is  quite  different  from 
what  is  understood  under  this  term  by  every  civilized 
nation.     It  is  not  at  all  synonymous  in  Russia  with 


THE  RELIGIOUS  TRADITION  125 

the  individual  freedom  of  everybody  to  believe  what- 
ever he  chooses.  The  idea  of  religion  is  so  bound  up 
there  with  the  idea  of  state  and  nation  that  the  law 
makes  no  attempt  to  draw  a  distinction  between  them. 
Orthodoxy  is  a  "Russian"  religion  just  as  Protestant- 
ism is  considered  in  Russia  to  be  the  "German"  reli- 
gion. Every  nation  is  free  to  believe  its  own  religion : 
that  is  what  is  meant  by  the  fundamental  law.  "Let 
the  Poles  worship  God  according  to  their  Latin 
rite;  but  Russian  people  always  were  and  will  remain 
Orthodox;  together  with  their  Tsar  and  Tsarina  they 
above  all  venerate  and  love  the  native  Orthodox 
church."  This  is  a  resolution  which  the  Tsar  wrote 
some  years  ago  concerning  such  Russian  people  as 
were  converted  from  Catholicism  to  Orthodoxy  in 
western  provinces  of  Russia. 

Accordingly  there  is  no  freedom  as  regards  your 
personal  belief;  you  are  free  only  to  adhere  to  the 
faith  in  which  you  are  born.  An  exception  is  made 
from  this  fundamental  principle  for  the  benefit  of  the 
established  church,  which  is  free  to  receive  converts 
of  any  other  religion.  Otherwise  the  principle  is 
applied  rigorously.  A  man  born  in  the  Russian  reli- 
gion cannot  possibly  change  it.  He  may  be  heretic  or 
a  freethinker;  he  may  not  believe  in  anything;  he 
still  is  supposed  by  law  to  remain  Orthodox;  and  he 
may  be  formally  compelled  to  appear  before  a  con- 
fessional and  to  partake  of  a  holy  communion  once  a 
year  at  least.  If  he  insists  (the  fact  is  hypothetical)  on 
his  individual  belief,  he  still  does  not  cease  to  be 
Orthodox :  he  is  merely  an  "erring  Orthodox,"  and 
he  is  supposed  to  repent  and  then  to  be  given  over  to 


126  RUSSIA  AND  ITS  CRISIS 

his  confessor,  in  order  to  learn  better.     The  law  does 
not  foresee  the  possibility  that  anybody  would  further 
insist  on  his  individual  belief.     But  this  is  not  all.     As 
the  change  of  the  Orthodox  religion  is  not  admitted 
to  be  possible,   no  legal  punishment   for  the  change 
exists,  unless  there  be  some  criminal  transgression  con- 
nected with  the  new  form  of  faith  adopted;    e.  g., 
mutilation  of  members.     The  law  is  strictly  consistent, 
considering  every  change  as  nullc  ct  non  avenue.     But 
there  is  another  side  of  the  question.     The  convert  is 
not  held   responsible;    but  then   the   responsibility   is 
with  the  converter.     Here  is  the  point  where  persecu- 
tion sets  in.     Not  being  able  to  deal  with  the  converts, 
and  even  being  obliged  to  comply  with  the  conversion 
in  the  next  generation,   the  law  concentrates  all   its 
severity  on  the  would-be  converters.     A  criminal  must 
be  found  when  there  is  a  crime.     And  so  the  punish- 
ments are  very  severe — exile  to  Siberia  or  even  hard 
labor — if  the  conversion  chances  to  be  to  a  sect  that  is 
proclaimed  by  the  authorities  "particularly  dangerous." 
Such  is  the  case  with  all  new  sects  that  make  prose- 
lytes.    You  will  be  interested  in  one  of  them  that  is 
most  like  the  Baptists,  the  Stundists.     The  law  pro- 
claims Russian  Stundism  "particularly  dangerous"  and 
severely  treats  the  "converters."    The  same  law  admits 
the  existence  of  the  Baptists  as  a  foreign  denomination. 
Now,  a  formal  struggle  is  going  on  between  the  sectar- 
ians who,  in  the  case  of  a  judicial  trial,  attempt  to 
prove  that  they  are  Baptists,  and  the  home  mission- 
aries, who  declare  the  Baptist  faith  to  be  a  "German 
faith,"  not  permitted  to  Russian  sectarians.     The  ad- 
ministrative authorities  are  always  with  the  mission- 


THE  RELIGIOUS  TRADITION  127 

aries;  but  the  judges  are  sometimes  on  the  side  of 
sectarians.  The  result  of  a  trial  is  thus  always  un- 
certain. 

The  principle  that  a  Russian  is  always  supposed 
to  be  Orthodox  admits  also  of  other  applications  w  hich 
practically  lead  to  the  same  result  of  crying  intolerance. 
The  spirit  of  proselytism  has  always  been  absent  from 
the  Orthodox  church ;  it  would  seem  strange  to  a 
Russian  to  convert  the  Chinese  and  the  Japanese  to 
Orthodoxy.  But  upon  a  Russian  subject  Orthodoxy 
must  be  inflicted,  for  the  sake  of  national  uniformity, 
not  for  religious  reasons.  And  so  it  happened  to  Rus- 
sian missionaries,  who  very  rarely,  if  ever,  try  to 
convert  men  of  foreign  creed,  to  convert  at  a  bound 
one  and  a  half  millions  of  adherents  of  the  United 
church  (Graeco-Catholic)  in  1836-39,  and  later  about 
half  a  million  of  Protestants,  Catholics,  and  United 
Greeks  in  Poland  and  thfe  western  and  the  Baltic  gov- 
ernments of  Russia.  The  result  of  this  forced  con- 
version, which  was  meant  to  be  the  best  means  for 
Russianization,  may  be  seen  in  the  official  reports  of 
Mr.  Pobedonostsev.  The  report  for  1895  showed 
that  73,000  forced  converts  to  Orthodoxy  "stubbornly 
clung  to  the  errors  of  Catholic  faith;"  in  1896  their 
number  increased  to  77,000;  in  1898,  to  83,000.  Ac- 
cording to  the  same  official  reports,  these  people  were 
"without  any  assistance  of  the  church,  either  not  per- 
forming sacraments  and  spiritual  duties,  or  doing  so 
clandestinely,  in  local  and  foreign  Catholic  churches." 
In  1898  there  were  2(y,yyy  children  whom  their  par- 
ents preferred  to  be  unbaptized,  and  8,699  marriages 
contracted  without  religious   (/.  e.,  official)    sanction. 


128  RUSSIA  AND  ITS  CRISIS 

I  do  not  need  to  add  anything  about  dismissed  Catholic 
priests  and  Protestant  pastors  who  were  performing 
their  duties;  about  formal  fights  for  churches,  and 
monasteries  sentenced  to  be  closed  by  Russian  author- 
ities. The  facts  are  too  well  known  by  Europe,  which, 
some  years  ago,  protested  in  vain  against  such  treat- 
ment of  coreligionists. 

Of  course,  the  educated  classes  of  Russia  have  not 
remained  indifferent  to  such  a  state  of  religious  intoler- 
ance. The  cry  for  freedom  of  belief  and  tolerance  in 
matters  of  religion  has  always  been  a  war  cry  of  the 
Russian  liberals ;  nay,  even  of  certain  Russian  conser- 
vatives also.  I  shall  quote  to  you  some  recent  pleas 
for  religious  freedom,  belonging  to  this  latter  class. 
At  one  of  the  last  congresses  of  Russian  missionaries 
resolutions  were  passed  with  a  view  to  enforcing  prose- 
cution against  sectarians;  among  other  things  it  was 
proposed  as  a  general  measure — it  had  already  been 
used  in  individual  cases — to  take  children  from  the 
sectarian  parents  and  to  let  them  be  educated  by  Ortho- 
dox persons.  Then  an  isolated  voice  was  raised 
against  such  barbarous  measures,  a  voice  that  reminded 
the  fathers  at  the  meeting  of  Christian  charity  and 
tolerance.  That  was,  however,  the  voice  of  a  layman, 
a  marshal  of  nobility,  Mr.  Stahovich.  Mr.  Stahovich 
proposed  that  the  missionaries  demand  from  the 
government  the  real,  the  individual,  freedom  of  con- 
science. It  gave  the  signal  for  a  tempest  of  indignation 
against  existing  intolerance  in  the  liberal  press,  and 
provoked  many  denunciations  of  Mr.  Stahovich  on  the 
part  of  the  clergy.  Since  then  the  question  of  tolerance 
has  not  been  silenced.     It  was  again  raised  and  dis- 


THE  RELIGIOUS  TRADITION  129 

cussed  by  a  Petersburg  private  society  for  religious  and 
philosophic  culture  which  had  been  founded  for  pur- 
poses of  defending  conservative  nationalism,  and  as 
such  had  enjoyed  a  certain  protection  in  influential 
spheres  of  Petersburg.  Then  the  debates  and  the  ad- 
dress delivered  on  this  occasion  by  Prince  Volkonsky 
— known  to  America  as  a  lecturer — were  published 
in  a  monthly  having  nothing  in  common  with  Russian 
liberals  but  this :  It  happened  to  be  published  after 
the  manifesto  of  the  Tsar,  and  as  the  opinions  of  the 
society  and  of  the  monthly  both  stood  in  decided  con- 
tradiction with  what  was  considered  to  be  freedom 
of  conscience  in  that  official  document,  both  the  society 
and  the  journal  made  only  a  hairbreadth  escape  from 
suppression;  both  were  saved  by  their  conservative 
reputations  only.  This  will  help  you  to  realize  to 
what  an  extent  the  idea  of  an  actual  religious  freedom 
is  popular  and  how  widely  spread  it  is  through  all 
educated  strata  of  Russian  society. 

Some  attempts  were  even  made  to  connect  this  idea 
of  religious  freedom  with  the  conservative  tradition 
of  Russia.  Slavophils  were  the  first  to  attempt  a 
reconciliation  between  the  spirit  of  tradition  and  the 
spirit  of  religious  freedom.  We  know  already  that 
according  to  the  teaching  of  Slavophils,"  liberty  of 
opinion  was  admitted  to  be  the  inalienable  though  only 
right  of  the  people,  and  as  such  it  was  opposed  to 
liberal  aspirations  after  larger  political  rights.  "Power 
to  the  government ;  free  opinion  to  the  people;"  such 
was  the  political  scheme  of  the  Slavophils.  This  im- 
plied  freedom   of  conscience  as   well   as   freedom   of 

"  See  p.  56. 


130  RUSSIA  AND  ITS  CRISIS 

speech.  But  the  Slavophils  failed  to  perceive  that 
freedom  of  conscience  was  also  a  political  right,  like 
others  which  they  denied,  and  not  likely  to  be  realized 
alone.  And  thus  their  political  ideal  was  doomed  to 
remain  a  sentimental  Utopia.  Whatever  our  opinion 
may  be  on  this  subject,  one  thing  may  be  safely  inferred 
from  everything  that  has  been  said  in  this  chapter. 
This  inference  is,  that  religious  freedom  and  tolerance 
mean  nothing  less  than  a  break  with  Russian  national- 
istic tradition.  And  if  they  are  one  day  to  come,  they 
will  come  as  the  negation  of  the  ancient  religious  tra- 
dition of  Russia. 


CHAPTER    IV 

THE    POLITICAL    TRADITION 

Let  me  remind  you  of  the  general  trend  of  our 
discussion  which  now  is  to  be  pursued  further.  We 
started  from  the  nationahstic  supposition  that  Russian 
Orthodoxy  was  one  of  the  most  distinctive  features  of 
the  Russian  national  type.  Such  was  at  least  the  com- 
mon belief  of  Russian  nationalistic  politicians.  This 
belief  necessarily  implied  that  Orthodoxy  had  remained 
unchanged,  as  befitted  a  distinctive  feature  of  an  im- 
mutable national  type.  It  seemed  particularly  fitting 
to  choose  for  such  a  distinctive  feature  the  Orthodox 
creed,  just  because  immutability  was  thought  to  be 
an  inherent  quality  of  Christianity  in  general  and  the 
eastern  form  of  the  Christian  creed  especially.  Now 
we  have  seen  that  as  a  matter  of  fact  Russia  is  no 
exception  to  the  general  rule  of  religious  change  and 
evolution.  There,  as  everywhere,  Christianity  suffered 
change  :  it  took  as  many  different  shapes  as  there  were 
consecutive  stages  of  culture.  And  these  stages  were 
the  same  in  Russia  as  everywhere  else.  First,  as  we 
saw,  there  was  a  long  stage  of  transition  from  pagan- 
ism to  ritualism.  Then  followed  the  stage  of  transition 
from  ritualism  to  evangelical  and  spiritual  Christianity. 
Peculiar  to  Russia  was  the  particular  circumstance  that 
the  established  church  refused  to  take  any  active  part 
in  aid  of  this  religious  evolution,  but  was  very  active  in 
its  repression.     Owing  to  the  non-interference  of  the 

»3i 


132  RUSSIA  AND  ITS  CRISIS 

established  church,  the  whole  process  in  Russia  took  a 
somewhat  incidental  character.  The  religious  move- 
ment was  deprived  of  its  natural  leaders,  and  thus  a 
regular  evolution  of  doctrine  was  made  impossible. 
Moreover,  the  natural  growth  of  religious  thought  was 
branded  schism  and  heresy,  and  thus  exposed  to  the 
prosecution  of  the  authorities  and  doomed  to  popular 
disgrace.  This,  of  course,  could  not  prevent  the  final 
triumph  of  new  religious  ideas,  but  it  helped  greatly 
to  retard  the  movement.  Yet,  in  spite  of  all  these 
obstacles,  the  movement  went  its  natural  way  and  has 
long  broken  all  ties  of  tradition.  Religious  feeling 
was  not  unchangeable  in  Russia,  as  we  see,  and  if 
Orthodoxy  was,  so  much  the  worse  for  it.  The  pale 
of  the  established  church  was  therefore  forsaken  by 
everybody  who  wanted  any  kind  of  living  religion.  If 
everything  remained  unchanged  inside  the  "true  fold," 
it  was  because  there  was  no  life.  Accordingly  we 
come  to  the  conclusion  that  religions  immutability  is 
not  a  national  distinction  of  Russia,  because  there  was 
no  religious  immutability,  perhaps  not  even  within 
the  precincts  of  the  established  church. 

Now  that  we  pass  to  the  study  of  the  political  tra- 
dition, we  shall  have  to  face  a  similar  error  of  judg- 
ment ;  and  it  is  to  be  corrected  in  a  similar  way ;  i.  e., 
by  confronting  it  with  the  real  process  of  political 
evolution.  The  error  consists  this  time  in  the  idea 
that  the  actual  political  form,  autocracy,  never  has 
changed  and  is  unchangeable.  This  is  considered  by 
Russian  nationalists  to  be  the  second  essential  feature 
of  the  national  type.  We  shall  soon  see  that  this  theory 
itself  is  of  very  recent  origin;    and  that  even  at  the 


THE  POLITICAL  TRADITION  133 

time  of  its  appearance  it  did  not  correspond  to  the 
scientific  evidence  then  available.  Indeed,  the  theory 
of  the  persistence  of  Russian  political  tradition  clashes 
with  the  facts  of  history  still  more  obviously  than  the 
idea  of  the  persistence  of  the  religious  tradition.  Some 
seventy-five  years  ago,  when  historical  knowledge  was 
yet  in  its  infancy,  it  was  possible  to  hold  the  view  that 
the  Russian  state  at  its  very  coming  into  existence  was 
monarchical.  But  then  the  necessary  stages  of  political 
development  previous  to  the  building  of  a  state  had 
not  yet  been  studied  by  European  scholars,  and  no 
social  embryology  existed.  The  theory  of  the  evolu- 
tion of  political  forms  was  not  yet  much  in  advance  of 
Aristotle's  teachings,  though  even  those  should  have 
prevented  the  error  in  question.  Now  that  we  have 
this  further  knowledge,  only  such  people  as  are  inter- 
ested in  supporting  old  prejudices  still  cling  to  the 
antiquated  theory.  Nevertheless  the  theory  is  made 
obligatory  by  Russian  fundamental  law;  not  to  share 
it  is  considered  a  political  crime,  which  may  be  pun- 
ished by  forced  labor  in  Siberia. 

But  let  us  look  at  the  facts  in  the  light  of  the 
contemporary  science  of  sociology.  Three  consecutive 
stages  of  political  organization  are  generally  distin- 
guished by  writers  on  sociology :  that  of  tribal  society, 
that  of  the  feudal  state,  and  that  of  the  national- 
military  state,  from  which  the  contemporary  constitu- 
tional state  is  evolved.  Was  there  anything  corre- 
sponding to  these  three  stages  in  Russian  political 
development  ? 

Before  we  answer  this  question  we  must  first  con- 
sider that  even  in  western  Europe  the  political  develop- 


134  RUSSIA  AND  ITS  CRISIS 

ment  was  not  entirely  uniform  in  different  countries. 
As  we  advance  eastward  from  the  Atlantic  shore  to 
the  Urals,  we  are  sure  to  find  the  whole  process  more 
and  more  backward,  and  less  intense.  The  same  pro- 
cess of  the  growth  of  the  state  out  of  the  tribal  organi- 
zation which  we  observe  going  on  upon  the  Seine  and 
the  Loire  as  early  as  the  fifth  and  sixth  centuries 
appears  in  the  seventh  and  eighth  centuries  east  of 
the  Rhine,  from  the  ninth  to  the  eleventh  on  the  Ger- 
man eastern  marches  (i.  e.,  in  Prussia  and  Austria), 
from  the  tenth  to  the  twelfth  in  Bohemia  and  on  the 
Dnepper,  and  in  the  twelfth  and  thirteenth  in  Lithuania. 
The  chief  reason  for  a  comparatively  later  start  is,  of 
course,  the  lack  of  inner  springs  of  development.  As 
such  inner  springs  we  may  consider  the  social  differ- 
entiation within  the  tribal  society  and  the  resulting 
changes  in  its  composition.  As  a  rule,  the  tribal  stage 
of  social  existence  comes  to  an  end  when  the  leading 
families  of  the  tribe  contrive  to  promote  themselves 
to  a  position  of  local  power,  i.  c,  when  the  local  aris- 
tocracy appears.  The  only  privilege  of  such  leading 
families  at  the  beginning  of  the  process  was  generally 
that  their  members  should  be  by  preference  chosen  as 
headmen  of  clans  or  tribes.  Later  on  they  usurped 
a  kind  of  overlordship  over  the  territory  of  the  tribe, 
claimed  the  right  to  dispose  not  only  of  the  un- 
settled march  land  and  wastes,  but  also  of  the  common 
grounds  of  their  fictitious  kinsmen,  and  finally  man- 
aged to  get  possession  of  the  whole  estate,  as  its  legal 
proprietors,  while  the  other  landholders  were  dispos- 
sessed and  reduced  to  the  state  of  dependent  farmers, 
or   even   to   that   of   half-free   "villains."      Thus   the 


THE  POLITICAL  TRADITION  135 

democratic  composition  of  tribal  society  evolved  itself 
into  the  aristocratic  composition  of  a  feudal  society. 
The  social  groups  built  up  on  the  ground  of  blood- 
relationship  (real  or  fictitious)  gave  way  before  social 
constructions  founded  on  territorial  power  and  depend- 
ence. The  collective  ownership  of  land  was  supplanted 
by  the  regime  of  private  property.  Thus  the  village 
community  became  a  "manor." 

The  building  of  the  great  landlords'  estates  thus 
may  be  called  the  inner  spring  of  development  from 
a  tribal  to  a  feudal  organization  of  society.  Wherever 
this  inner  spring  is  missing,  no  development  from  tribe 
to  state  is  possible,  unless  some  outward  political  ele- 
ments should  supply  the  lack.  Sooner  or  later  these 
outward  causes  begin  to  act  in  the  same  way  as  the 
inner  causes  would.  As  a  rule,  they  are  two — war  and 
commerce — and  their  action  is  to  emphasize  differences 
in  wealth  and  power  among  the  members  of  the  tribe. 
But  when  wealth  and  power  come  directly  from  with- 
out instead  of  being  accumulated  by  a  prolonged  pro- 
cess of  organic  development,  their  influence  on  the 
primitive  tribal  organization  must  necessarily  be  differ- 
ent. In  such  a  case  the  elements  of  political  power 
brought  from  abroad  enter  into  immediate  connection 
with  the  local  elements  of  tribal  democracy,  without 
the  intermediate  link  of  indigenous  aristocracy  be- 
tween the  former  and  the  latter.  Thence  the  retarded 
development  of  the  feudal  state  comes  to  be  quite 
different  from  that  in  typical  lands  of  mediaeval  feudal- 
ity. The  representatives  of  political  power  take  the 
place  that  the  local  landlords  had  failed  to  take  posses- 
sion  of;    and   they   do   so   by   owning   the   common 


136  RUSSIA  AND  ITS  CRISIS 

grounds  and  wastes,  by  holding  the  state  offices  in 
their  own  hands — in  short,  by  taking  possession,  as  far 
as  they  can,  of  the  superior  ownership  of  the  entire 
domain  and  the  overlord  rights.  Under  these  condi- 
tions the  social  process  of  development  of  the  landed 
aristocracy  is  postponed.  It  becomes  a  secondary  re- 
sult of  a  previous  political  development ;  i.  e.,  the  build- 
ing of  an  aristocracy  is  in  a  large  degree  dependent  on 
the  policy  of  the  rulers,  instead  of  being  able  to  influ- 
ence and  to  modify  this  very  policy. 

Now,  as  we  have  said,  the  farther  east  we  go  in 
Europe,  the  slower  is  the  process  by  which  society 
becomes  aristocratic  and  feudal.  We  know,  then,  what 
we  have  to  expect  from  the  study  of  early  social  de- 
velopment and  political  institutions  in  Russia.  A  long- 
protracted  tribal  existence,  an  undeveloped  territorial 
aristocracy,  a  political  power  coming  from  without 
and  easily  appropriating  the  overlord  rights  over  land, 
a  class  of  officials  that  gathers  around  and  derives  its 
further  claims  from  its  position  as  king's  servants — 
such  are  the  particular  features  of  the  Russian  feudal 
state.  With  all  these  peculiarities,  the  state  that  is 
being  so  formed  already  bears  within  itself  the  germ 
of  the  future  autocracy;  but  this  germ  is  first  de- 
veloped when  the  central  power  assumes  military  func- 
tions, in  the  process  of  political  unification. 

Unhappily,  we  do  not  possess  sufficient  informa- 
tion about  the  tribal  organization  of  early  Russia. 
Some  scholars  have  even  gone  so  far  as  to  deny  its 
very  existence.  But  this  is  quite  wrong.  The  fact  is, 
indeed,  that  in  the  central  parts  of  the  territory  of 
early  Russia  the  political  power,  judging  even  from 


THE  POLITICAL  TRADITION  137 

our  earliest  sources  of  information,  had  so  much  en- 
croached upon  the  tribal  organization  that  only  scanty 
traces  are  left  for  our  curiosity.  But  even  these  are 
enough  for  historical  reconstruction.  Thus,  we  may 
yet  trace  in  earlier  sources  (eleventh  century)  the  ex- 
istence of  the  joint  responsibility  of  kinsmen  in  cases 
of  avenging  murder  or  of  receiving  the  fees  exacted 
from  the  murderer's  relatives.  Of  course,  the  degree 
of  kinship  in  which  the  members  of  a  family  were 
bound  to  revenge  was  very  narrow;  and  the  group 
that  was  obliged  to  pay  the  fee  seems  to  be  half 
voluntarily  formed ;  the  whole  frame  of  tribal  organi- 
zation seems  thus  very  loose  and  decadent.  Still, 
enough  is  preserved  to  bear  witness  to  centuries  of 
fuller  existence.  The  chief  of  the  Russian  house  com- 
munion (corresponding  to  the  Welsh  gwely)  has  in 
the  earliest  sources  the  same  name  as  that  by  which  he 
is  known  in  early  Bohemia.  He  is  called  ognishchanin, 
i.  c,  the  chief  of  the  principal  homestead,  where  the 
ancestral  hearth,  ogneschay,  is  located — the  tyddyn  of 
the  Welsh.  The  fee  for  his  murder  was  higher  than 
for  that  of  a  common  man ;  it  was  equal  to  that  of  a 
king's  servant.  In  the  city  these  "town  ancients"  were 
even  admitted  to  the  king's  council.  In  the  country 
they  very  probably  managed  sometimes  to  push  them- 
selves into  the  position  of  proprietors  of  the  whole 
village.  At  least  we  may  draw  such  a  conclusion 
from  a  recently  discovered  source,  the  circular  letter 
of  the  metropolitan  Clement,  written  in  the  middle 
of  the  twelfth  century.  He  speaks  there  about  some 
people  who  seek  "vain  glory"  :  "They  acquire  house 
after  house,  village  after  village;   they  take  possession 


138  RUSSIA  AND  ITS  CRISIS 

of  liberated  slaves  (isgoccs)  as  much  as  of  joint  own- 
ers (sayhrees) ,  of  new  clearings  (lahda)  as  much  as 
of  ancestral  holdings  (stareeny)^  The  quoted  pas- 
sage points  out,  as  we  see,  two  types  of  appropriated 
property,  and  to  each  type  corresponds  a  particular 
category  of  settlers.  Evidently  such  proprietors  as 
are  censured  here  enlarged  their  estates  first  by  appro- 
priating tribal  lands  which  were  already  cultivated 
(ancestral  holdings),  and  second  by  colonizing  new 
ground.  They  used  as  colonists  the  "liberated  slaves" 
and  other  persons  who  had  forsaken  their  situations 
and  were  tramping,  looking  around  for  some  new 
station.  These  are  the  Russian  isgoccs,  as  they  are 
known  from  other  sources;  they  seem  to  me  to  be 
identical  with  the  hospitcs  of  Polish  and  Bohemian 
mediaeval  law.  Now,  the  other  category  mentioned, 
that  of  the  "joint  owners,"  the  saybrcc,  who  were 
dwelling  on  their  "ancestral  holdings,"  is  particularly 
interesting  to  us.  This  category  is  spoken  of  here  for 
the  first  and  the  only  time  in  early  Russian  records. 
In  Poland  and  Bohemia  they  are  more  often  mentioned 
under  the  name  of  the  hcrcdcs^  or  the  originariL^ 
In  both  Poland  and  Bohemia  the  position  of  these 
heredcs  and  originarii — the  "joint-owners" — is  quite 
clear :  they  were  no  longer  free  tenants,  but  were 
already  appropriated  by  former  headmen  of  their  tribal 
groups,  by  the  ogneschahne,  who  thus  became  big 
landed  proprietors.  Thanks  to  the  circular  letter  of 
Clement,  we  now  may  conclude — if  our  commentary 

^  The  legal  heirs,  the  possessors  of  the  "  grandfathers'  holdings," 
the   daydechee. 

^  Corresponding  to  the  Russian  term  staroshiltsee. 


THE  POLITICAL  TRADITION  139 

is  found  right — that  in  Russia  the  same  process  of 
social  differentiation  was  going  on  and  came  to  its 
natural  end.  This  end  was  the  dislocation  of  tribal 
groups  and  the  building  of  large  private  estates,  or  a 
new  aristocracy. 

But  why,  then,  are  not  the  "joint-owners"  and 
their  landlords  more  often  mentioned  in  early  Russian 
documents  ?  The  most  probable  answer  is  that  neither 
class  was  numerous  enough  to  be  taken  as  character- 
istic of  social  life  in  early  Russia.  Of  course,  there 
were  landlords  and  landed  aristocracy,  independent  of 
the  rulers  of  the  land  and  even  opposed  to  their  rule; 
but  they  were  not  many,  and  they  soon  disappeared, 
giving  way  to  the  aristocracy  of  new  origin — that  of 
the  grantees  of  the  prince,  holding  land  and  money 
from  him,  forming  his  court  and  his  military  suite, 
following  him  wherever  he  went,  from  town  to  town, 
from  land  to  land,  until  he  and  they — or  rather  the 
descendants  of  both — became  definitely  settled.  Thus, 
lacking  a  strong  landed  aristocracy  of  tribal  origin  in 
Russia,  the  old  cultivators  had  more  chance  of  pre- 
serving the  ownership  of  their  ancestral  holdings  until 
the  prince  himself  came  and  took  possession  of  the 
overlord  rights,  which  were  still  unappropriated  by 
the  families  of  the  headmen  of  the  tribe.  Such  was 
actually  the  position  of  the  overwhelming  majority 
of  Russian  peasants  in  early  Russia — the  smcrds,  as 
they  were  called.  If  a  smcrd  died  without  leaving 
heirs,  his  holding  was  inherited  by  the  prince  of  the 
land;  the  prince  was  considered  to  be  the  superior 
owner  of  the  whole  territory  and  immediate  owner  of 
the  unoccupied  lands.     But  the  consequences  of  this 


140  RUSSIA  AND  ITS  CRISIS 

general  supposition  had  not  yet  been  realized  by  law. 
The  prince  did  not  seem  to  possess  the  right  to  eject 
the  sjiicrds  from  their  holdings,  or  even  to  exact  from 
them  anything  besides  the  old  custom  of  the  land. 
Such  seems  to  have  been  the  legal  position  of  the 
heredes  —  the  daydechec  —  of  western   Slavic  law. 

But  all  this  was  to  be  changed  later  on.  And  per- 
haps the  very  conditions  under  which  the  changes  were 
made  were  to  a  great  extent  the  same  in  Russia  as  in 
the  western  Slavic  states.  What  was  impossible  and 
inconsistent  with  old  custom  in  the  lands  of  old  culture 
became  quite  natural  when  princes  began  to  colonize 
uninhabited  lands.  Such  lands  must  have  been  numer- 
ous on  the  marches;  therefore  Russian  princes,  like 
Bohemian  and  Polish  ones,  very  early  showed  their 
preference  for  transferring  their  activity  to  the  boun- 
daries of  their  dukedoms,  there  to  build  and  to  colon- 
ize, using  the  wandering  strollers  and  indigenous 
cultivators  as  a  ready  material  for  colonization.  To 
attract  the  colonists  to  their  lands,  the  princes  gave 
them  franchises  (the  Ihotas  of  Bohemian  and  Russian 
law)  ;  once  settled,  such  colonists  were  not  often  re- 
moved from  their  holdings,  and  thus  the  settlers  in 
their  turn  became  the  "old  inhabitants,"  the  staro- 
sheeltsee.  The  idea,  however,  remained,  that  the  land 
was  not  theirs,  but  belonged  to  the  prince;  and  thus 
was  introduced  the  custom  of  disposing  of  these  lands, 
of  buying  and  selling  them,  giving  them  as  land  grants 
and  conveyances,  with  the  peasants  on  them  as  their 
natural  appurtenance.  Of  course,  no  remains  of  tribal 
property,  no  joint-ownership,  could  be  preserved  there; 
in  fact,  they  had  already  been  destroyed  by  the  very 


THE  POLITICAL  TRADITION  141 

process  of  the  migration  of  isolated  settlers  to  the 
marches,  where  their  clearings  and  villages  from  the 
very  beginning  took  the  form  of  purely  individual 
settlements. 

Such  were  the  elements  of  early  social  life  in  Rus- 
sia, and  such  was  the  difference  in  composition  be- 
tween the  old  political  center  and  the  land  of  new 
culture.  We  shall  presently  see  which  prevailed.  But 
before  we  go  any  farther  we  must  make  this  difference 
between  the  types  of  Russian  culture  clearer,  inasmuch 
as  they  are  determined  by  differences  of  geographical 
position  and  historical  influence. 

The  Russian  territory  was  so  large  and  the  stages 
of  culture  in  the  neighboring  countries  were  so  varied 
that  we  really  cannot  expect  to  find  throughout  the 
country  one  single  line  of  development.  There  is, 
indeed,  no  such  uniform  process  going  on.  Before  any 
such  general  process  could  begin,  it  had  to  be  preceded 
by  a  number  of  local  processes  in  various  parts  of  the 
vast  country,  which  were  partly  interrupted  by  con- 
quest or  political  unification,  partly  preserved  and  de- 
veloped into  a  higher  stage  of  existence.  For  a  very 
long  time  these  local  processes  had  no  relation  whatever 
to  one  another.  When,  in  the  second  half  of  the  ninth 
century  A.  D.,  a  Norwegian  traveler,  Ohter,  visited 
"Gandvik;"  i.  c,  the  White  Sea,  he  found  there  the 
wild  Beormas,  while  on  the  southern  extremity  of 
contemporary  Russia,  on  the  Black  Sea,  the  refined 
culture  of  the  Greek  colonies  still  survived.  They 
were  two  different  worlds,  as  dissimilar  as  Athens  and 
Greenland — these  two  opposite  shores  of  eastern 
Europe,  just  at  the  time  when  the  germ  of  the  Russian 


142  RUSSIA  AND  ITS  CRISIS 

State  was  formed  at  a  central  point  between  them  on 
the  Dnepper.  When,  seven  centuries  later,  an  English 
seaman,  Richard  Chancellor,  landed  on  tne  shores  of 
the  White  Sea,  the  situation  was  entirely  changed. 
The  chief  current  of  national  life  in  Russia  was  so 
much  enlarged  that  the  inhabitant  of  the  northern 
shores  was  bound  to  know  of  the  existence  of  country- 
men on  the  southern  shores;  at  least  he  was  just  then 
obliged  by  the  growing  state  to  pay  a  certain  tax  every 
year  for  the  release  of  Russian  prisoners,  who  were 
regularly  abducted  by  the  robber  states  of  the  Black 
Sea  shores,  and  whom  the  Muscovite  state  was  as  yet 
unable  to  protect  with  its  military  force.  Thus,  in  the 
middle  of  the  sixteenth  century,  the  White  and  the 
Black  Seas  were  first  brought  into  some  connection 
by  the  central  organization.  During  all  this  long 
period,  from  the  ninth  to  the  sixteenth  century,  there 
was  no  general  political  organization  in  Russia.  Local 
processes  followed  each  its  own  line  of  development. 
Before  the  Muscovite  type  of  culture  prevailed  many 
other  types,  differing  geographically  and  chronologic- 
ally, thrived  and  flourished.  It  is  easy  to  guess  that 
the  earlier  types  w^ere  located  in  the  best  situations. 
We  may  distinguish  the  following : 

I .  The  primary  south  Russian  type,  which  we  have 
already  spoken  about.  It  was  in  this  southwestern  cor- 
ner of  Russia  that  the  Russian  state  originated.^  The 
surroundings  were  there  the  best  to  be  found  in  Rus- 
sia; and  yet  even  here  the  state  could  not  be  evolved 
by  a  mere  process  of  inner  organic  evolution.  Com- 
merce  and   war.    these   outward    springs   of   political 

^  See  adjoining  map. 


THE  POLITICAL  TRADITION  143 

development/  helped  the  Russian  state  into  existence. 
A  brisk  commerce  on  the  Dnepper  was  the  combined 
effect  of  two  purely  external  causes:  the  advanta- 
geous geographical  position  on  the  "Great  Waterway" 
from  Scandinavia  to  Greece — the  "Eastern  Way" 
(Austrvegr)  of  the  Scandinavian  sagas — and  the  good 
luck  of  there  being  at  the  extreme  ends  of  this  eastern 
way  three  nations :  the  Northmen,  who  were  very 
enterprising,  and  the  Greeks  and  Arabs,  who  were 
very  rich  and  who  wanted  to  buy  the  products  of  the 
north — furs,  wax,  honey,  serfs,  etc.  The  necessity  of 
war  was  also  determined  by  a  merely  external  cause : 
the  political  cataclysms  of  inner  Asia,  which  drove 
from  it  hordes  of  Turkish  tribes  into  southern  Russia. 
The  commerce  with  the  Greeks  and  Arabs  attracted 
Scandinavian  adventurers,  scattered  them  through  all 
the  "Eastern  Way,"  made  them  build  towns  and  estab- 
lish the  beginnings  of  political  organization.  The 
necessity  for  the  defense  of  the  commercial  highways 
from  southern  nomads  made  the  Northmen  organize 
their  military  force  on  a  larger  scale.  And  so  it  came 
about  that  the  military  defense  of  the  roads  and  water- 
ways of  commerce  was  concentrated  in  Keeyev,  the 
residence  of  the  early  Russian  princes  of  Swedish  ex- 
traction. 

Aside  from  the  "Great  Way,"  where  no  regular 
commercial  intercourse  existed  and  no  military  defense 
was  needed  everything  went  on  as  before.  The  tribal 
organization  remained  untouched  and  entire,  including 
all  the  three  degrees  of  kinship  :  the  house  communion, 
the  minor  clans  ("brotherhood,"  or  "the  larger  kin- 

*See  p.  135. 


144  RUSSIA  AND  ITS  CRISIS 

dred")  with  their  heads,  and  the  tribe  with  its  greater 
chief.^ 

This  looser  tribal  government  made  the  conquest 
of  such  tribes  very  difficult  and  by  its  means  they  were 
able  to  protract  their  separate  existences.  But  the 
period  of  prosperity  of  the  few  commercial  centers  on 
the  main  river  was  also  very  short.  After  the  Arabian 
kingdoms  fell  under  the  arms  of  the  Turks,  and  their 
kindred  tribes  in  the  Russian  steppes  became  too  power- 
ful to  be  kept  off  by  the  southern  princes,  the  Russian 
dukedoms  quickly  became  impoverished  and  one  by 
one  finally  yielded  to  the  Tartar  yoke.  Such  was  the 
end  of  the  splendor  of  the  southern  commercial  state 
system  which  had  existed  from  the  middle  of  the  ninth 
to  the  middle  of  the  thirteenth  century. 

2.  After  this,  the  center  of  political  life  shifted  west 
and  north.  Even  such  a  fictitious  unity  as  persevered 
in  the  first  period  did  not  now  exist,  and  three 
quite  different  political  groups  had  evolved  from  the 
union  of  the  southern  system.  Near  to  the  original 
scene  of  historical  action,  a  secondary  southern  type 
was  developed  under  the  strong  influence  of  Polish 
feudalism.  But  it  was  just  this  influence  which,  some 
centuries  later,  proved  the  chief  cause  of  its  decay. 
The  feudal  organization,  being  too  loose,  was  obliged 
to  give  way  to  the  stronger.  Presentl}'-,  we  shall  again 
refer  to  this  type. 

3.  The  northern  type  of  the  Russian  merchant 
republic  was  Novgorod  and,  though  on  a  much  smaller 

°  At  least  so  we  may  conclude  from  the  fact  of  the  existence  of 
whole  tribes  called  by  patronymic  names  and  at  the  same  time 
lacking  every  central  power ;  e.  g.,  the  descendants  of  Radeem,  or 
Vatko. 


THE  POLITICAL  TRADITION  145 

scale,  Pskov.  Though  dependent  on  western  neighbors 
to  buy  its  merchandise,  Novgorod  gathered  its  riches 
from  the  enormous  territories  of  colonized  land  which 
stretched  as  far  eastward  as  the  Urals.  It  was  able, 
therefore,  to  preserve  its  power  during  many  centuries, 
until  it,  too,  met  with  the  stronger  organization  of 
central  Russia.  And  at  that  time  the  democratic  rule  of 
Novgorod  had  already  changed  into  the  oligarchy  of 
rich  merchants,  who  dominated  the  republic  through 
the  general  assembly  of  citizens. 

4.  The  next  was  the  Muscovite  type,  that  of  the 
colonized  "marches."  We  shall  have  to  speak  of  this 
at  greater  length.  Owing  to  their  extended  estates  and 
to  their  position  as  superior  owners  of  the  whole  land, 
the  Muscovite  princes  had  at  their  disposal  greater 
pecuniary  resources,  and  so  it  proved  possible  for 
them  to  organize  a  large  military  class  of  landed  pro- 
prietors. That  is  why  they  prevailed  in  the  general 
struggle  for  unification. 

5.  Yet  powerful  as  the  Muscovite  princes  were  in 
directing  the  process  of  unification,  and  reckless  as 
were  the  means  they  employed,  they  could  not  ex- 
tinguish the  chief  differences  between  their  stock  lands 
in  central  Russia  and  the  lands  annexed  from  the  terri- 
tories of  the  other  types  just  mentioned.  Thus  some 
secondary  types  came  into  existence.  Two  of  them 
in  particular  must  be  named.  First  the  northern 
peasant  type,  which  was  formed  from  the  territories  of 
Novgorod.  There  was  no  landed  military  class  there; 
rather,  the  country  served  the  state  by  its  contributions 
of  money.  On  our  map  we  call  these  regions  the 
"  Peasant  Districts ; "  the  Muscovite  government 
called  them  "Black"  or  "Tributary  Districts." 


146  RUSSIA  AND  ITS  CRISIS 

6.  The  second  new  type  formed  after  the  process  of 
unification  was  at  its  end.  This  is  that  of  the  new 
southern  colonization.  We  dwelt  long  enough  on  this 
type  in  our  first  chapter.  The  older  part  of  this  region 
of  new  colonization  was  not  very  different  from  the 
Muscovite  center,  but  in  measure  as  we  descend  south- 
ward, the  population  takes  on  a  more  modern  aspect. 
This  is  the  land  of  new  religious  currents,  while 
the  Old-belief  found  its  adherents  among  the  peasants 
of  the  old  Novgorodian  north.  Here  also  wheat  is  cul- 
tivated and  coal  and  iron  mines  are  concentrated ;  while 
in  the  center,  for  a  long  time,  it  has  not  been  considered 
worth  while  to  pay  much  attention  to  agriculture,  and 
in  the  north  the  products,  as  well  as  the  population, 
remain  extremely  scanty.  In  short,  the  Russian  south 
is  "the  promised  land"  of  the  Russian  future.  The 
ties  and  traditions  of  the  past  do  not  press  on  it  and 
easily  give  way  to  everything  connected  with  the  new 
phase  of  Russian  existence.  Thus  this  territory  may 
be  compared  with  the  American  West.  For  nearly 
all  the  features  mentioned  may  find  their  counterparts 
in  American  researches  concerning  the  settlement  of 
the  West.  I  have  only  to  refer  to  the  valuable  articles 
of  Mr.  Turner,  of  the  University  of  Wisconsin.*^ 

We  must  now  return  to  the  history  of  the  two 
chief  regions  which  played  the  most  prominent  part  in 
the  general  history  of  Russia.  These  are  the  primary 
southern  type  and  the  Muscovite.  The  difference  be- 
tween them  is  quite  obvious;  it  may  be  explained  as 
the  difference  between  the  land  of  old  tribal  settlement 

"  The  geographical  disposition  of  all  these  regions  of  Russian 
culture  may  be  seen  on  the  map. 


THE  POLITICAL  TRADITION  147 

and  the  land  of  later  colonization  on  the  "marches." 
The  rulers  of  the  marches,  as  we  have  seen,  were  much 
freer  in  carr3^ing  on  the  process  of  settlement.  They 
easily  appropriated  over  the  whole  of  their  territory  the 
rights  of  an  overlord,  as  they  had  not  to  deal  with 
any  former  claims  of  local  organizations  or  of  the 
indigenous  aristocracy.  And  thus  it  is  that  the  social 
and  political  organization,  on  the  marches,  proved 
comparatively  more  powerful,  just  as  it  had  shown 
itself  on  both  of  the  German  marches,  Austria,  and 
Brandenburg,  in  northern  France,  and  partly  in  Poland 
and  Bohemia.  Nevertheless,  this  fundamental  differ- 
ence between  the  two  types  of  settlement  has,  for 
various  reasons,  often  been  denied.  The  Muscovite 
princes  themselves  pointed  to  the  continuous  succes- 
sion of  both  types  whereon  to  lay  the  foundations  of 
their  right  to  possess  the  "whole  of  Russia."  Some 
modern  scholars  of  the  nationalistic  set  used  the  same 
argument  to  prove  the  right  of  the  central  government 
to  "Russianize"  the  "whole  of  Russia."  Then  an  oppo- 
site set  of  scholars,  the  radicals,  set  to  work  to  prove 
that  the  northern  Russia  of  later  times  had  been  con- 
nected with  early  southern  Russia  by  the  democratic 
tradition  of  folkmotes,  afterward  so  treacherously  be- 
trayed by  the  Muscovite  princes.  Then  came  an  inde- 
pendent scholar  of  law,  Mr.  Sergueyevich,  who  wished 
to  prove  that  there  was  no  fundamental  difference 
between  the  southern  and  the  northern  Russian  type, 
as  both  societies  were  founded  on  the  same  principle  of 
contract.  Contract  was  meant  to  be  opposed  as  much 
to  the  ties  of  blood,  i.  c,  to  the  tribal  organization  of 
society,  as  to  the  ties  of  state  subjection,  /,  e.,  to  the 


148  RUSSIA  AND  ITS  CRISIS 

modern  organization  of  society.     And  so  far  it  is  true 
that  both   southern  and  northern   Russian  types  are 
intermediate    between    the    tribal    and    the    miHtary- 
national  stages  of  Russian  history;   but  it  is  none  the 
less  true,   too,   that  the  southern  type  originated   in 
tribal  society,  and  that  the  northern  type  finished  in 
the  military-national  organization  of  John   III.   and 
John  IV.     And  so  we  are  bound  to  suppose  that  in 
the  southern  type  there  persisted  a  something  which 
kept  it  ever  connected  with  its  tribal  origin,  and  in 
the  northern  something  was  inherent  that  compelled 
it  to  culminate  in  an  autocracy.     Both  types  had,  of 
course,  enough  elements  in  common,  yet  it  was  not 
these,  but  the  divergent  elements,  which  determined 
their  final  issue.     These  latter  elements  we  have  in 
the  beginning  of  our  discussion  already  pointed  out. 
We  saw  that  while  aristocratic  elements  were  gener- 
ally lacking  in  Russian  social  life,  they  were,   com- 
paratively speaking,  more  lacking  in  the  northern  type 
than   in   the  southern.     Also,   we   saw   that   political 
power,  which  was  generally  stronger  in  eastern  than 
in  western  Europe,  was  comparatively  stronger  in  the 
north  than  in  the  south  of  Russia,  and  that  here  it 
assumed  the   form  of  a   general   proprietorship  over 
the  whole  territory.     And  because  of  these  character- 
istics of  northern  Russia — a  weaker  development  of 
the  aristocracy  and  a  stronger  development  of  the  cen- 
tral  power — the    question    arose   whether   this    inter- 
mediate stage  between  tribe  and  state  still  has  anything 
in  common  with  the  feudalism  of  western  Europe. 

The  answer  is  closely  connected  with  what  we  have 
already  said.     If  the  territorial  aristocracy  of  great 


THE  POLITICAL  TRADITION  149 

landed  proprietors  was  not  much  developed  in  Russia, 
and  if  the  territorial  power  of  princes  was  much  more 
developed  than  in  western  Europe,  we  should  have  no 
reason  to  expect  that  western  feudalism  would  appear 
in  Russia,  especially  in  the  north.  But  feudalism  had 
another  chance  to  develop  on  Russian  territory — in  the 
secondary  southern  type. 

After  the  primary  southern  type  had  been  ex- 
tinguished at  the  time  of  the  Tartar  invasion,  and  the 
southern  population  had  been  driven  backward — west- 
ward to  the  Polish  frontier  and  northward  to  Lithuania 
— a  new  period  of  life  began  in  these  regions;  and  the 
more  developed  Polish  organization  proved  very  in- 
fluential to  it.  Then,  indeed,  many  features  of  western 
feudalism  appeared  in  western  Russia  and  in  Lithuania. 
There  was  formed,  for  instance,  a  compact  class  of 
landed  aristocracy,  which,  by  the  privilege  granted  in 
the  year  1447,  finally  emancipated  itself  from  royal 
taxation  and  justice,  and  so  made  it  necessary  for  the 
state  power  in  each  separate  case  to  ask  the  lords,  by 
dint  of  summoning  them  to  a  national  council,  to  share 
in  the  military  contributions  and  to  serve  in  the 
military  service.  This  national  council  was  soon 
transformed  into  a  regular  parliament,  consisting  of 
separately  summoned  magnates,  as  well  as  of  formally 
elected  knights,  who  represented  their  class  organiza- 
tion in  the  shire.  (There  was  no  representation  of 
boroughs.)  The  competency  of  this  great  general 
diet  was  extended  to  the  sphere  of  legislation,  and 
even  of  foreign  politics.  Thus  the  Lithuanian  and 
western  Russian  baronage  encroached  on  the  rights 
of  their  kings,  just  as  the  Polish  baronage  had  done 
aforetime. 


150  RUSSIA  AND  ITS  CRISIS 

The  consequence  was  that  the  central  power  be- 
came too  weak  to  organize  an  effective  defense  of  the 
country  at  the  very  time  when  such  a  defense  was 
particularly  necessary.  For  it  was  the  epoch  of  con- 
stant struggles  on  all  the  frontiers,  except  that  of  the 
allied  and  united  kingdom  of  Poland.  The  Turks  and 
Tartars  were  attacking  the  southern  frontier;  the 
Teutonic  knights  had  to  be  driven  from  the  north ; 
and,  from  the  east,  Muscovite  princes  were  threatening 
to  bring  back  the  territory  of  the  old  Russian  duke- 
doms. This  made  the  Lithuanian  princes  ready  to 
grant  concessions  in  order  to  get  money,  military 
levies,  and  mercenaries,  all  of  which  the  barons  of 
the  land  were  slow  to  grant.  Having  got  whatever 
social  and  political  privileges  they  wished,  the  barons 
did  not  for  that  become  any  the  more  attentive  to  the 
state  necessities.  The  feudal  type  of  state  in  western 
Russia  and  Lithuania  was,  therefore,  obliged  to  yield 
to  the  Muscovite  type,  which  was  at  that  time  recon- 
structed after  a  more  oriental  fashion.  The  necessities 
of  the  times  then  felt  in  Moscow  were  quite  the  same 
as  those  in  Vilna  or  Warsaw :  they  needed  money 
and  soldiers,  but  they  were  supplied  in  an  entirely 
different  and  far  more  successful  manner.  The  Mus- 
covite prince  had  no  feudal  elements  to  contend  with; 
therefore  he  took  his  lessons  in  politics  from  the  By- 
zantine empire,  from  the  southern  Slavic  states  on 
the  Balkans,  perhaps  even  from  Turkey,  rather  than 
from  Poland  or  western  Europe.  There,  on  the  con- 
fines of  Europe  and  Asia  on  the  Bosporus,  the  capital 
problem  of  a  standing  army  was  resolved  almost  as  in 
mediaeval  Europe :  lacking  money  to  give,  the  state 
distributed  its  land  among  the  warriors. 


THE  POLITICAL  TRADITION  151 

Similar,  too.  was  the  final  result  of  the  whole  opera- 
tion :  the  grantees  finally  became  landed  proprietors. 
But  in  general  this  final  forming  of  the  landed  aristoc- 
racy took  place  in  the  Orient  at  a  much  later  date,  at  a 
time  when  the  original  aim  of  the  military  organization 
had  been  achieved ;  either  the  conquest  had  been  made, 
as  in  Turkey  from  the  fifteenth  through  the  seventeenth 
century,  or  the  national  state  was  already  founded, 
as  in  Russia  during  the  same  period,  or  the  military 
landholders  were  transformed  by  foreign  conquerors 
of  later  times  into  landed  proprietors,  as  by  the  Eng- 
lish in  India  and  the  French  in  Algiers.  In  all  these 
cases  the  appropriation  of  state  lands  by  private 
owners  did  not  lead  to  the  feudal  organization  of  so- 
ciety, because  the  central  power  was  already  too  strong 
to  be  dispossessed  of  its  superior  rights  in  the  land. 
It  was  quite,  opposite  with  the  feudal  aristocracy  of 
western  Europe,  which  preceded  the  development  of 
a  central  administration,  and  thus  succeeded  in  over- 
powering the  state. 

The  origin  of  the  oriental  system  of  land  grants 
for  w^arriors  may  be  traced  to  the  moment  when 
both  great  eastern  monarchies,  Byzantium  and  Per- 
sia, met  together  in  a  decisive  clash.  Kosru  Nushir- 
w^an  was  the  Persian  ruler  of  the  Sassanian  dynasty 
who  first  used  the  system  against  the  emperor  Justin- 
ian, in  the  sixth  century  A.  D.  A  century  later 
Arabian  khalifs  stepped  into  the  place  of  the  Persian 
kings,  dividing  the  demesne  among  their  own  new 
warriors ;  this  was  the  origin  of  the  Moslem  military 
organization,  which  lasted  for  centuries.  The  attacks 
of  the  Arabs  on  Constantinople  made  the  Byzantine 


152  RUSSIA  AND  ITS  CRISIS 

emperors  adopt  the  same  system  of  "military  tenure." 
At  last  the  Turks  superseded  the  Arabs,  in  the  eleventh 
and  thirteenth  centuries,  and  soon  proved  to  be  much 
more  dangerous  to  Constantinople.  They  improved 
and  completed  the  military  system  of  the  Persians  and 
the  Arabians;  and  the  Byzantine  emperors  had  only 
to  follow  their  example.  Thus  the  Ottoman  military 
holdings,  the  temars  and  zeeams,  appeared,  and  they 
were  closely  followed  by  the  Byzantine  proneas,  which 
had  just  the  same  meaning.  The  system  of  "proneya 
holdings"  was  then  adopted  by  the  southern  Slavs. 
This  system  can  be  studied  particularly  well  in  Ser- 
via  in  the  fourteenth  century.  The  institution  is  every- 
where the  same:  the  military  holders — proneyars  as 
well  as  the  teemarlces,  or  spahecs  of  the  Ottoman  em- 
pire—  were  not  the  owners  of  their  holdings,  but 
merely  temporary  possessors;  and  they  held  their 
allotments  only  so  long  as  they  were  able  to  perform 
military  service.  While  possessing  their  allotments 
they  could,  under  the  threat  of  being  punished  and 
even  deprived  of  their  holdings  in  case  of  oppression 
of  the  peasants  and  deterioration  of  the  estate,  claim 
from  their  peasants  only  such  taxes  and  services  as 
were  strictly  determined  by  the  law.  As  the  holdings 
were  not  hereditary,  the  heirs  of  the  possessors  had  to 
ask  for  the  renewal  of  the  grant,  and  were  by  no 
means  sure  to  get  it  back  undiminished.  Such  were 
at  least  the  arrangements  of  the  law,  which  of  course 
were  often  disregarded  in  reality.  Now,  this  eastern 
system  of  military  holdings  was  borrowed  by  the  Mus- 
covite princes  just  at  the  time  when  their  western 
neighbors  and  competitors  in  Lithuania  were  vainly 


THE  POLITICAL  TRADITION  153 

exerting  themselves  to  get  money  and  soldiers  from 
their  "great  general  diets,"  in  the  fifteenth  and  six- 
teenth centuries.  Thus  the  same  state  necessity  which 
led  to  a  complete  development  of  the  feudal  elements 
in  Lithuania  and  helped  aristocracy  to  its  fullest 
development,  kept  back  their  development  in  Moscow. 
To  forestall  possible  objections  to  this  opposing 
of  the  Russian  system  of  military  holdings  as  oriental 
to  the  feudal  system  of  the  west  of  Europe,  some 
further  details  are  here  necessary.  To  be  sure,  north- 
eastern Russia  had  also  possessed  a  kind  of  feudal 
land-tenure,  even  before  the  oriental  system  had  been 
introduced.  But  this  ancient  system  had  nothing  in 
common  with  the  niilitary  allotments  of  land.  What- 
ever such  allotments — and  they  were  not  over-numer- 
ous— existed  during  that  earlier  period,  the  fourteenth 
and  fifteenth  centuries,  were  granted  by  the  princes  in 
return,  not  for  military,  but  for  court  service.  And 
whatever  landed  estates  were  held  at  that  time  by  men 
of  military  service  were  not  granted;  they  were  held 
as  absolute  properties ;  not  as  conditional  holdings  from 
the  state  authorities,  but  by  right  of  inheritance.  The 
very  name  of  these  lands  proves  their  status  :  they  were 
called  "father's  holdings."  Such  private  holdings 
stood  in  no  connection  whatever  with  military  service, 
for  a  possessor  of  a  "  father's  land  "  was  entirely  free 
to  serve  whom  he  liked,  or  even  not  to  serve  at  all. 
Thus,  for  instance,  in  the  middle  of  the  sixteenth  cen- 
tury there  were  574  private  possessors  in  the  four 
little  counties  of  the  dukedom  of  Tver  (already  in- 
corporated by  Moscow).  But  only  230  of  these  were 
in  the  Muscovite  service;  sixty  proprietors  served  the 


154  RUSSIA  AND  ITS  CRISIS 

bishop  of  Tver,  forty-six  served  the  three  repre- 
sentatives of  a  lateral  branch  of  the  former  princes  of 
Tver,  about  twenty  served  different  persons,  while  150 
served  nobody. 

It  will  be  seen,  therefore,  that  there  existed  in 
northern  Russia  no  principle  which  corresponded  to 
the  fundamental  notion  of  feudalism,  and  which 
French  legists  formulated  in  their  thesis:  no  land 
without  sovereign  (nulle  terre  sans  seigiieur).  And 
there  was  no  idea  that  a  landed  proprietor  should 
necessarily  serve  his  own  sovereign;  i.  e.,  the  lord  of 
the  territory  on  which  his  estate  was  situated.  In 
Lithuanian  Russia  the  conditions  were  more  like  those 
of  western  feudalism ;  but  even  here  the  right  of  a 
landed  proprietor  to  serve  whom  he  liked  was  acknowl- 
edged, though  only  on  the  express  statement  of  the 
condition,  in  a  contract;  if  it  were  not  so  stated,  the 
proprietor  legally  lost  his  estate  when  he  went  to 
another  sovereign.  In  northern  Russia,  as  we  have 
said,  this  fundamental  principle  of  western  feudalism 
did  not  exist.  "Free  service"  was  here  the  rule  and 
so  dependent  "military  tenure"  of  the  subsequent  period 
had  no  possibility  of  evolving  out  of  this  "free  service." 

The  origin  of  the  military  holdings  in  the  Musco- 
vite state  grew  out  of  something  different  from  west- 
ern feudalism ;  namely,  from  a  principle  identical  at  bot- 
tom with  that  of  the  oriental  states.  Dependent  mili- 
tary tenure  of  the  oriental  states  was  always  founded 
on  the  idea  of  the  superior  property  rights  of  the  prince 
in  the  whole  land;  without  this  idea  of  overlordship 
no  grants  from  the  state  lands  were  possible.  In  By- 
zantium this  idea  of  the  superior  right  of  the  emperor 


THE  POLITICAL  TRADITION  155 

was  derived  from  a  Roman  and  a  Christian  source. 
In  Mussulman  states  it  originated  in  the  general  teach- 
ing of  the  Koran  concerning  property.  In  the  Mus- 
covite dukedom  the  idea  existed  also ;  but  here,  as  we 
have  seen,  it  had  a  different  origin — the  extended 
power  of  the  prince  on  the  marches.  This  fact  was 
then  further  developed  and  formed  into  a  principle  of 
law  under  Byzantine  and  Tartar  influences.  Indeed, 
the  princes  of  Moscow  began  very  early  to  dispose  of 
free  cultivators  and  their  lands.  As  early  as  the  four- 
teenth century  we  see  them  granting  and  exchanging, 
"permitting"  persons  of  different  stations  to  buy  the 
free  peasants  of  central  Russia  as  appurtenances  of  the 
land  whereon  they  lived,  and  themselves  buying  them 
from  other  proprietors.  Thus,  so  early,  land  grants 
were  made  without  the  least  consideration  for  the  "old 
inhabitants  "  of  the  granted  lands.  Thus  the  condition 
necessary  to  the  introduction  of  the  military  tenure 
system— the  right  to  dispose  of  settled  land  and  of  its 
peasant  inhabitants — was  already  existing  at  the  mo- 
ment when  the  process  of  political  unification  began, 
and  the  necessity  of  military  reform  was  felt. 

One  thing  was  yet  lacking,  however.  The  quantity 
of  settled  lands  in  central  Russia  was  not  sufficient  to 
build  up  at  once  an  extended  class  of  holders  of  military 
allotments.  Such  lands  as  the  prince  possessed  here  in 
the  center  had  to  serve  another  purpose:  they  were 
distributed  among  the  servants  of  his  court,  in  order 
to  organize  and  make  safe  the  regular  supply  of  grain, 
hay,  meat,  and  other  necessities  and  pleasures  of  his 
private  household.  It  was  only  when  the  political  uni- 
fication of  Russia  under  the  Muscovite  rule  be^an  that 


156  RUSSIA  AND  ITS  CRISIS 

the  formation  of  an  extended  military  class  became 
particularly  urgent.  But  just  then  the  same  process 
of  unification  made  this  formation  of  a  new  Muscovite 
army  possible,  by  increasing  immensely  the  quantity 
of  lands  to  be  freely  disposed  of  by  the  Muscovite 
princesJ  Little  is  known  as  to  how  this  process  of 
military  reform  went  on ;  but  what  we  do  know  of 
it  is  quite  sufficient  to  prove  that  the  reform  was  car- 
ried out  systematically,  and  that  the  measures  taken 
were  so  bold  and  decisive  that  they  must  have  brought 
about  a  rather  serious  revolution  in  the  Russian  landed 
property  of  that  time. 

The  military  reform  was  begun  by  John  III.,  the 
contemporary  of  Mohammed  II.,  and  was  achieved  by 
John  IV.,  the  contemporary  of  Suleiman  the  Splendid. 
And  the  years  in  which  the  chief  reform  measures  were 
taken  correspond  almost  identically  with  those  years 
which  saw  the  chief  Turkish  measures  for  the  intro- 
duction of  the  system  of  military  tenure.  In  1484 
John  III.,  who  had  just  incorporated  the  Novgorodian 
possessions,  dispossessed  in  that  country  more  than 
eight  thousand  big  and  little  hereditary  proprietors, 
and  transferred  there,  to  be  settled  on  these  estates  of 
former  proprietors,  as  many  military  holders  of  the 
new  type  as  he  wanted.  To  find  so  large  a  number  of 
tenants,  he  moved  the  military  servants  from  the 
courts  of  his  big  vassals  and  placed  them  in  direct 
allegiance  to  himself.  This  lower  class  of  subvassals 
or  "courtiers"  (dvoryane)  formed  thus  the  chief  ele- 
ment out  of  which  the  holders  of  new  military  tenures 
were  taken.     The  ancient  class  of  hereditary  owners 

^  Vide  map,  "  Making  of  the  Russian  State." 


THE  POLITICAL  TRADITION  157 

of  their  "fathers' Jands"— the  "boyars"  and  the  "sons 
of  boyars"— were  presently  lowered  to  the  same  con- 
dition as  the  courtiers,  and  obliged  by  the  government 
to  serve  as  if  they  too  were  holders  of  military  tenures, 
and  not  of  lands  owned  as  private  property.  In  fact, 
these  "sons  of  boyars"  were  even  placed  beneath  the 
"courtiers"  in  rank  as  early  as  the  middle  of  the  six- 
teenth century.  The  name  of  "courtiers"  became 
thenceforth  the  preferred  one  for  designating  Russian 
"noblemen,"  while  the  "sons  of  boyars"  formed  the 
lowest  layer  of  the  military  class :  they  were  supposed 
to  serve  in  provincial  detachments  of  the  army,  while 
the  "courtiers"  were  often  enabled  to  enter  the  city 
regiments,  and  even  to  be  promoted  to  the  dignities 
of  the  court. 

This  sudden  reversal  of  the  comparative  social  posi- 
tion of  the  old   hereditary  owners  and   of  the   new 
dependent  landholders  was  made  possible  by  a  series 
of  state  measures.     First,  the  military  duties  of  both 
classes  were  equalized,  by  exacting  from  the  old  land- 
owners the  same  military  service  that  the  new  holders 
of  military  allotments  were  obliged  to  perform.    Then, 
from  both  these  classes,  so  mixed  up,  a  choice  was 
made  by  the  government  of  John  IV.  in  1550,  of  those 
best  fitted  for  the  court— the  Tsar's  guard.    The  chosen 
"thousand"  had  to  serve  the  Tsar  in  Moscow;    there- 
fore new  allotments  were  apportioned  to  them  within 
a  radius  of  a  hundred  miles  from  Moscow.     Some 
fifteen  years   afterward   a   new   revolution   in   landed 
property— the  last  one  of  this  series— appears  to  have 
been  accomplished.     The  old  hereditary  proprietors  in 
the  recently  annexed  territories,  particularly  the  larger 


158  RUSSIA  AND  ITS  CRISIS 

and  more  influential  ones,  were  once  more  in  a  large 
measure  dispossessed.  New  holders  from  Moscow 
took  their  place,  and  they  were  put  in  a  particularly 
close  connection  with  the  "court,"  which  was  made  a 
separate  political  institution  opposed  to  the  "land,"  a 
kind  of  state  within  the  state.  These  measures  appear 
to  have  done  away  with  the  large  estates  and  inde- 
l^endent  landed  property,  in  so  far  as  at  that  time  they 
still  existed  in  northeastern  Russia.  All  higher  social 
elements  were  now  mercilessly  overthrown;  the  Mus- 
covite society  was  systematically  and  intentionally 
leveled,  to  form  the  foundation  of  an  autocratic  power. 
Thus,  by  nothing  less  than  a  series  of  social  revolu- 
tions, completed  nearly  within  a  century  ( 1484  to 
1584),  was  begun  the  political  tradition  of  autocracy. 
The  official  doctrine  of  autocracy  was  always  that 
Russian  monarchy  was  eminently  democratic.  We 
can  see,  however,  that  this  was  true  only  in  the  sense  of 
its  being  the  enemy  of  the  landed  aristocracy.  For 
the  Muscovite  princes  really  had  got  rid  of  the  aris- 
tocracy. Only  in  so  doing  they  were  supported  not  so 
much  by  the  population  in  general  as  by  a  lower  class 
of  "serving  men,"  the  "courtiers."  So  far  from  being 
relieved  by  the  outcome  of  this  struggle,  the  peasant 
population  paid  its  expenses,  sacrificed  as  they  were 
to  the  holders  of  military  allotments.  Indeed,  though 
the  statutes  of  John  IV.  determined  in  detail  how  these 
military  tenants  ought  to  serve  the  government,  noth- 
ing at  all  was  determined  as  to  their  rights  and  duties 
toward  their  peasants.  Thus  was  laid  the  foundation 
for  a  future  slavery.  We  saw  that  even  in  Byzantine 
law   and    in   the    Ottoman    and    southern    Slavic   law 


THE  POLITICAL  TRADITION  159 

the  position  of  the  peasants  on  military  tenures  was 
strictly  determined,  and  the  rights  of  tenants  legally 
circumscribed.  Of  course,  the  possessors  could,  as 
they  sometimes  did  by  the  inadvertence  of  the  authori- 
ties, appropriate  their  tenants'  holdings;  but  they  were 
not  likely  to  appropriate  the  peasants  themselves  and 
make  them  into  bondmen,  as  was  the  case  in  Russia. 
Accordingly,  the  Russian  autocracy  may  be  called  anti- 
aristocratic,  military,  oriental,  if  you  like;  at  least 
it  never  really  was  democratic. 

But  we  shall  have  other  occasions  to  come  back  to 
the  history  of  the  social  elements  of  Russia.  Now 
that  we  are  studying  the  political  tradition,  we  are 
much  more  concerned  in  other  deductions  from  the 
facts  just  set  forth.  We  have  seen  how  the  autocracy 
came  into  existence  and  power  at  the  end  of  the  fif- 
teenth century,  but  we  do  not  yet  know  of  any  tradi- 
tion of  the  autocracy.  It  was  entirely  new  when  it  first 
appeared;  in  the  past  it  had  no  antecedents,  if  we  do 
not  consider  as  such  the  actual  power  that  the  princes 
on  the  marches  possessed  in  higher  measure  than  other 
princes  of  mediaeval  Russia.  The  new  regime  had  yet 
to  work  out  its  own  predominance  by  a  formal  struggle 
against  the  heterogeneous  elements  in  politics  and  in 
social  structure.  In  short,  autocracy  at  the  moment 
of  its  origin  in  the  process  of  the  building  of  a  militaiy- 
national  state  was  new  and  unprecedented.  Has  it 
since  that  time  remained  unchanged,  so  as  to  form  a 
standing  tradition?  Or  has  it  undergone  a  further 
process  of  evolution?  This  is  what  we  have  now  to 
consider. 

Autocracy,  so  far  as  we  can  know  at  present,  was 


i6o  RUSSIA  AND  ITS  CRISIS 

nothing  more  than  a  material  fact,  an  event  of  history. 
A  fact,  in  order  to  grow  into  a  tradition,  must  become 
an  idea.  What  idea,  then,  had  autocracy  to  represent 
from  the  time  of  its  first  appearance  onward?  Un- 
doubtedly there  was  such  an  idea:  the  political  and 
national  unity  of  the  Russian  state  just  then  in  process 
of  formation.  But  the  idea  of  unity  was,  of  course, 
not  inseparably  connected  with  that  of  a  definite  polit- 
ical form.  There  must  have  been  some  other  ideas  at 
hand  to  make  such  a  connection  strike  root  in  the  popu- 
lar mind.  Let  us  then  consider  closely  from  what 
elements  the  primary  idea  of  autocracy  was  formed 
in  the  minds  of  its  founders,  which  of  these  elements 
were  lasting,  and  whicli  proved  temporary  and  tran- 
sient ;  lastly,  what  changes  the  original  idea  underwent 
in  its  further  development. 

It  is  generally  known  that  the  Russian  theory  of 
autocracy  was  a  reflection  of  the  Byzantine  idea  of  a 
theocratic  imperium,  or  "  c?esaro-papism,"  as  it  was 
sometimes  called.  But  what  is  less  known  is  that  this 
Byzantine  idea  was  not  entirely  understood,  and  was 
perhaps  never  completely  realized.  There  were  two 
different  elements  in  it,  one  juridical  and  the  other 
theocratic,  the  first  coming  from  the  Roman  law,  and 
the  second  from  a  Christian  source.  We  shall  presently 
see  that  the  second  alone  was  embodied  in  the  Musco- 
vite political  theory.  The  necessity  for  a  legal  theory 
of  power  was  not  much  felt  in  Moscow ;  the  very  fact 
of  there  being  such  a  power  as  the  Muscovite  princes 
possessed  seemed  to  be  quite  sufficient  in  itself.  When 
the  growing  Muscovite  dukedom  began  to  be  known 
by  western  Europe,  the  emissaries  of  both  pope  and 


THE  POLITICAL  TRADITION  i6i 

emperor  came  to  Moscow,  in  order  to  propose,  each 
for  his  side,  the  consecration  of  the  prince  to  the  dignity 
of  a  king,  if  he  would  agree  to  take  active  part  in  the 
struggle  of  Europe  against  the  Turks.  But — happily 
for  Russia — it  was  altogether  above  John's  power  of 
comprehension  to  understand  what  a  big  thing  the 
Holy  Roman  Empire  was,  and  what  kind  of  legitimacy 
it  could  impart  to  him  by  means  of  the  new  title.  All 
he  understood  was  that,  if  he  accepted  the  offer,  instead 
of  being  independent,  he  would  have  to  acknowledge 
some  foreign  sovereign.  From  this  disadvantage  he 
deliberately  shrank.  He  answered,  therefore,  that  he 
was  quite  satisfied  with  the  sanction  bestowed  on  him 
by  the  very  fact  that  his  power  was  hereditary,  that 
it  descended  to  him  "from  the  very  beginning,  from 
his  first  forefathers"  (1488).  But  then  John  soon  felt 
that  his  answer  was  not  quite  right  in  the  eyes  of 
foreign  diplomatists.  Would  not  his  more  civilized 
western  neighbor,  the  king  of  Poland  and  prince  of 
Lithuania,  be  afraid,  and  would  not  he  be  envied,  were 
he  called  by  the  pope  or  the  emperor  "King  of  the 
Whole  of  Russia?"  The  half  of  Russia  was  then 
under  Lithuanian  power. 

The  Muscovite  government  now,  hov/ever,  began 
to  think  whether  there  was  any  other  means  of  getting 
a  superior  title  and  of  preserving  the  claims  over  the 
"whole  of  Russia,"  without  asking  help  from  the  Ger- 
man "Cresar"  or  the  Roman  Pontifex.  After  some 
months  (1489)  the  Muscovite  ambassador  in  Vienna 
returned  the  emperor  an  unexpected  answer — an  an- 
swer proving  that  Russian  diplomatists  had  found  a 
way.  For  they  had  determined  that  John  should  assume 


i62  RUSSIA  AND  ITS  CRISIS 

the  high  position  quite  independent  of  the  sanction  of 
pope  or  emperor.  "Our  forefathers,"  the  Russian 
diplomatist  now  adds  to  his  former  explanation,  "were 
from  olden  times  friends  of  the  ancient  Roman  tsars, 
who  gave  Rome  to  the  popes  and  who  ruled  in  By- 
zantium." Thus,  even  then,  Russians  did  not  dare  yet 
affirm  anything  more  than  the  mere  fact  of  friendship. 
But  at  once  the  Russian  clergy  set  to  work  to  change 
this  presumed  friendship  into  a  relationship,  and  to 
build  on  this  last  supposition  the  theory  of  a  formal 
transmission  of  imperial  power. 

To  be  more  accurate,  it  was  not,  however,  the  Rus- 
sian clergy  that  started  this  learned  proof  of  the  theory. 
There  lived  in  Moscow  many  divines  from  southern 
Slav  countries,  which  just  then  had  been  conquered 
by  the  Turks.  They  transmitted  to  Moscow  their 
patriotic  hopes  for  the  liberation  of  their  countries. 
Thus  they  felt  it  necessary  to  adorn  the  Aluscovite 
rulers  with  all  the  insignia  of  power  and  dignity, 
which  they  had  formerly  bestowed  on  their  own 
Slavic  rulers.  An  Alexander  of  Bulgaria  or  a  Stephen 
of  Servia  had  already  worn  the  titles  and  the  insignia 
of  the  Romaic  emperors  in  the  fourteenth  century,  be- 
fore these  symbols  of  power  were  offered  to  John  of 
Moscow  in  the  end  of  the  fifteenth  century.  The 
"most  glorious"  Bulgarian  city  of  Tyrnov  had  already 
played  the  part  of  the  "second  Constantinople"  and 
the  "third  Rome,"  which  it  was  now  proposed  that 
Moscow  should  play.^  A  pedigree  was  concocted 
which  made  "C?esar  Augustus"  the  ancestor  of  the 
Russian  house  of  princes.     An  invented  legend  was 

*  See  p.  75- 


THE  POLITICAL  TRADITION  163 

spread  about,  containing  a  detailed  narrative  as  to  how 
and  when  a  formal  transmission  of  the  Byzantine  in- 
signia and  power  from  an  emperor  of  Constantinople 
to  the  Russian  prince  of  Keeyev  had  taken  place.     The 
Russian  divines  of  that  time  were  not  very  strong  in 
chronology,  and  so  they  unfortunately  chose  for  the 
hero   of   their   legend   an    emperor    (Constantine   the 
Monomach)  who  had  actually  died  when  his  would-be 
Russian    correspondent     (Vladeemir    the    Monarch) 
was  but  two  years  old ;   and  they  put  the  scene  of  the 
transmission  of  the  insignia,  which  they  supposed  to 
have  taken  place  in  the  eleventh  century,  into  surround- 
ings which  could  have  existed  only  five  centuries  earlier. 
Nevertheless  the  legend  found  credit  with  the  public, 
and  half  a  century  later  was  officially  adopted  by  the 
government,  which  now  wanted  the  patriarch  of  Con- 
stantinople to  confirm  it  by  a  general  decree  of  the 
council.     The  patriarch  seems  to  have  had  some  diffi- 
culties in  gathering  an  actual  council  for  this  purpose; 
and  so,  having  the  charter  drawn  up  in  his  chancellery, 
he  forged  the  fictitious  signatures  of  members  of  the 
imaginary  council.     This  was  all  very  well,  but  the 
contents  of  the  charter  were  not  what  Muscovite  di- 
plomatists expected  them  to  be.    The  patriarch  appears 
to  have  had  scruples  as  to  the  historical  reality  of  the 
facts,  alleged  in  the  nationalistic  legend  invented  in 
Moscow,   and   he,   therefore,   acknowledged   the   only 
one  that  could  truthfully  be  assumed :    the  baptism  of 
the  first  Christian  ruler,  Vladeemir  the  Saint,  and  his 
marriage  with  the  Byzantine  princess.     Now,  Musco- 
vite princes  did  not  care  much  about  historical  facts,  any 
more  than  they  cared  about  the  legal  validity  of  their 


i64  RUSSIA  AND  ITS  CRISIS 

claims  for  the  Byzantine  inheritance  of  power.  Thus 
they  even  did  not  wish  to  put  forward  the  best  claim 
they  actually  had  in  their  hands,  namely,  the  recent 
marriage  of  John  III.  with  the  heiress  of  the  last  Pale- 
ologue.  The  only  legal  heir,  at  the  time,  of  the  last 
Byzantine  emperor  was  ready  to  sell  his  rights  to  the 
highest  bidder,  but  he  vainly  urged  the  transaction  in 
Moscow,  and  finished  by  selling  his  inheritance  to 
Charles  VIII.  of  France.  The  Muscovite  prince 
wanted  his  claims  traced  to  a  deeper  antiquity,  one 
that  squared  better  with  his  fundamental  argument — 
that  his  power  was  inherited  from  his  own  "fore- 
fathers " — and  one  that  at  the  same  time  cost  him  no 
money.  Anyhow,  the  Muscovite  government  clung 
to  the  popular  legend,  and  then  it  resolved  to  introduce 
into  the  forged  charter  of  the  patriarch  a  clause  which 
should  make  it  prove,  not  the  historical  fact,  but  the 
spurious  legend.  The  theory  of  the  transmission  of 
the  imperial  power  was  now  openly  proclaimed,  the 
new  title  of  "Tsar"  (i.  e.,  Csesar)  was  solemnly  adopted 
by  John  IV.,  while  the  pseudo-Byzantine  insignia  were 
used  at  his  coronation  (1547),  and  the  newly  adopted 
legend  was  engraved  on  the  Tsar's  throne,  which  in 
the  Ouspensky  cathedral  of  Moscow  may  even  now 
be  seen — a  lasting  memorial  of  the  great  Muscovite 
fraud. 

Such  was  the  legal  origin  of  the  Russian  autocracy. 
The  legal  claim,  as  we  have  seen,  was  not  a  very 
strong  one;  and  thus  it  was  never  referred  to  in  the 
days  of  greater  enlightenment.  Autocracy  remained 
what  it  actually  was :  a  fact,  not  a  legal  institution. 
There  being  no  legal  foundation  for  its  support,  the 


THE  POLI'llCAL  TRADITION  165 

theoretical  vindication  of  autocracy  has  ahvays  been 
uncertain  and  wavering.  No  wonder,  then,  if  in  the 
course  of  our  subsequent  narrative  we  shall  find  dif- 
ferent attempts  to  prove  anew  the  necessity  of  autoc- 
racy, and,  at  the  same  time,  we  shall  find  that  those 
attempts  to  lay  new  theoretical  foundations  for  autoc- 
racy are  not  in  the  least  consistent  with  one  another. 
Not  being  bound  to  any  obligatory  tradition,  they 
necessarily  reflect  very  different  points  of  view,  cur- 
rent at  the  time  the  attempts  were  made.  What  they 
really  have  in  common  is  the  tacit  avowal  that  there 
never  existed  a  theory  of  autocracy  that  could  be  con- 
sidered binding  and  legally  valid. 

Just  such,  of  course — /.  e.,  binding  and  legally 
valid — the  initial  theory  of  autocracy,  that  of  the 
Byzantine  origin,  pretended  to  be.  But,  as  we  said 
before,  it  was  not  borrowed  in  its  full  extent  by  the 
Russian  authorities.  The  legal — the  Roman — ele- 
ments of  the  imperial  theory  did  not  find  an  adequate 
appreciation  by  Russian  lawyers.  There  were  no  law- 
yers, and  there  w-as  no  formulated  state  law  in  Russia 
at  that  time,  and  thus  no  attention  was  paid  to  such 
qualities  of  the  Roman  state  theory  as  gave  it  full 
weight  and  brought  it  into  greatest  consideration  in 
mediaeval  Italy,  or  France,  or  Spain.  There  existed 
no  "legists,"  or  letrados,  in  Russia  to  recall  the  im- 
perial law  of  a  princcps  Icgibus  solutus.  And,  on  the 
other  side,  feudal  elements  were  not  so  mighty  in  Rus- 
sia as  to  make  this  legal  formula  an  important  and 
necessary  weapon  against  them.  The  Russian  autoc- 
racy did  not  evolve  without  a  struggle,  as  we  have 
seen ;    but  this  was  not  a  struggle  of  legal  principles. 


i66  RUSSIA  AND  ITS  CRISIS 

On  the  contrary,  the  theocratic  elements  of  the  By- 
zantine theory  were  considered  much  more  important. 
As  we  have  seen  in  a  former  chapter,  the  first  part 
that  the  Muscovite  Tsar  had  to  play  as  successor  of 
the  Byzantine  emperor  was  a  religious  part — that  of 
a  defender  of  the  faith,  a  champion  of  Orthodoxy. 
The  national  state  was  founded  in  close  connection 
with  the  national  church.     The  clergy  were  the  first, 
and   for  some  time  the  only,   advocates   of  the  new 
political  theory ;   they  took  the  place  of  legists  in  Rus- 
sia.   Hence,  the  religious  proofs  of  the  rights  of  autoc- 
racy overcame  the  legal ;   in  fact,  the  former  were  the 
only  ones  that  found  currency.     Everybody  knew  that 
the  Tsar  was  the  representative  of  God  on  earth,  that 
just  for  this  reason  he  was  to  be  obeyed,  and  that  even 
his  trespasses  were  to  be  considered  as  God's  punish- 
ment for  sins ;  nobody  cared  to  know  more.    As  to  the 
prince  himself,  he  liked  better  to  infer  that  his  actual 
power  proceeded  from  his  forefathers,  instead  of  tra- 
cing it  to  a  more  ideal  origin,  /.  e.,  to  God  or  to  the  By- 
zantine emperor.     But  even  in  this  direction  the  legal 
theory  of  autocracy  remained  rudimentary ;   as  late  as 
the  beginning  of  the  nineteenth  century  there  existed 
no  legally  established  order  of  succession.     In  the  un- 
developed understanding  of  Muscovite  rulers^     Evi- 
dently the  actual  facts  appeared  much  more  solid  than 
any  legal  claims;    and  this  was  the  reason  why  they 
neglected  every  opportunity  of  getting  any  legal  foun- 
dation for  their  power. 

Now,  however,  the  theocratic  foundation  of  the 
Russian  autocracy  soon  became  very  much  enfeebled 
by  the  apostasy  of  the  Tsars   from   what  was  con- 


THE  POLITICAL  TRADITION  167 

sidered  by  the  overwhelming-  majority  of  the  nation 
to  be  pure  national  Orthodoxy.  We  know  the  facts : 
the  national  authorities  themselves  found  national  Or- 
thodoxy to  be  spurious ;  it  had  to  be  amended  after  the 
Greek  model.  Since  that  time  the  old  national  creed 
has  been  separated  from  the  national  state.  Moreover, 
the  representati\'es  of  the  state  were  thenceforth  con- 
sidered by  the  "Old-believers"  to  be  delegates,  not  of 
God,  but  of  Satan.  And  even  those  people  who  per- 
sisted in  their  former  belief  in  the  divine  rig-ht  of  the 
Tsars  were  indifferent  as  to  the  particular  rights  of 
any  given  representative  of  power.  Did  not  "every 
power"  proceed  from  God  ?  And  so  what  did  it  matter 
where  that  power  actually  lay?  The  "Period  of 
Troubles"  ( 1598- 161 3)  and  the  change  of  dynasty  may 
have  strengthened  this  way  of  thinking,  which  is  desig- 
nated by  a  contemporary  writer  under  the  picturesque 
term  of  "low-spiritedness." 

The  objection  may  be  raised,  however,  that  dur- 
ing the  "Troubles"  the  peasants  kept  defending  the 
right  of  a  legal  offspring  to  their  democratic  hero, 
John  IV.,®  and  that  thus  they  were  on  the  side  of  the 
right.  The  fact  is  true,  but  the  explanation  may  be 
otherwise.  The  peasants  just  defended  the  legal  heir 
as  their  Tsar,  one  likely  to  take  their  side;  and  at  the 
same  time  they  did  not  care  much  whether  he  was  an 
authentic  person  or  an  impostor.  The  "low-spirited- 
ness" of  those  people  made  them  sustain  the  right  of 
the  first  pretender,  if  only  he  was  supposed  to  represent 
the  popular  program.  The  popular  pretenders  to  the 
throne  of  the  Tsar  did  not  even  need  to  conceal  that 

•  See  chap,  vi,  pp.  353,  354. 


i68  RUSSIA  AND  ITS  CRISIS 

they  were  impostors.  Later  on,  Poogachov,  for  in- 
stance, not  satisfied  with  having  taken  the  false  name 
of  Peter  III.,  husband  to  Catherine  II.,  gave  to  his 
auxiharies  the  names  of  the  first  dignitaries  of  the 
empire.  Though  everybody  knew^  who  they  actually 
were,  nobody  refused  to  acknowledge  them  in  their 
new  quality.  The  power  of  the  Tsar  was,  of  course, 
sacrosanct;  but  it  w^as  an  institution,  not  a  particular 
person,  that  was  venerated  under  the  title.  Thus  even 
such  partisans  of  autocracy  as  admired  the  pretended 
love  of  the  Russian  people  for  their  rulers  the  most 
enthusiastically,  never  tried  even  to  prove  that  these 
people  were  legitimists.  "God  is  far  above,  and  the 
Tsar  is  far  off" — this  saying,  so  characteristic  of  the 
passive  obedience  and  indifferent  skepticism  of  Russian 
peasants  toward  any  actual  power,  always  remained. 
We  see  now  why  the  theocratic  foundation  of  autoc- 
racy could  not  supply  the  lack  of  a  legal  formula.  In 
any  case  such  a  legal  formula  had  yet  to  be  invented. 
This  w^as  done,  for  the  first  time  in  Russian  history,  in 
the  day  of  Peter  the  Great,  at  the  time  of  his  entire 
reconstruction  of  the  state  institutions  upon  European 
models.  Thus,  by  a  curious  coincidence,  the  autocracy 
got  its  legal  formula  at  the  very  moment  when  it 
had  decidedly  broken  with  its  oriental  past.  Naturally 
enough,  the  new  legal  formula  then  invented  was 
in  no  w^ay  dependent  on  the  old  theocratic  foundation 
of  autocracy.  Here  again  the  tradition  was  cut  off. 
The  new  formula  was  borrowed  from  the  current  and 
very  modern  doctrine  of  "natural  law."  According 
to  the  "law  of  nature"  the  human  rulers  were  not  to 
be  considered  as   vice-gefents  of  God,   appointed  by 


THE  POLITICAL  TRADITION  169 

direct  mandate  of  the  Creator,  but  rather  as  delegates 
of  the  people,  deriving  their  power  from  a  common 
consent,  "a  social  contract"  of  the  nation.  This  theory 
of  "the  social  contract"  was  formally  acknowledged 
during  Peter's  reign  in  the  official  writing  compiled  by 
the  enlightened  and  learned  archbishop,  Theophanes 
Prokopovich.  The  direct  aim  of  his  political  pamphlet 
was,  as  its  title  indicated,  to  prove  the  "Right  of  the 
Monarch's  Will;"  namely,  to  justify  Peter  the  Great's 
disposition  as  to  the  free  right  of  a  monarch  to  nomi- 
nate the  heir-apparent.  But  in  order  to  prove  that, 
Prokopovich  made  of  the  theory  of  social  contract  an 
acknowledged  state  theory.  "Every  form  of  govern- 
ment," Prokopovich  asserts,  "  has  its  origin  in  an  initial 
mutual  agreement  among  the  people."  Tlie  object  of 
this  agreement  being  the  general  welfare,  the  ruler  is 
obliged  to  care  for  the  common  good  of  the  people; 
though  in  case  of  inadvertence  or  misuse  of  his  power, 
even  in  Prokopovich's  theory,  he  is  answerable  only  to 
God. 

The  moral  feeling  of  Peter  himself  was  quite  in  har- 
mony with  this  new  doctrine  of  autocracy.  Peter  was 
one  of  the  first  and  most  typical  representatives  of  the 
"enlightened  absolutism"  of  the  eighteenth  century. 
Long  before  Frederic  the  Great,  he  proclaimed,  and 
actually  practiced,  the  theory  that  the  prince  is  the  first 
servant  of  the  people.  Of  course,  he  served  his  people 
as  he  himself  chose,  and,  on  account  of  his  crudity  and 
violence  of  temper,  his  was  a  most  despotic  rule.  It  was 
not  in  vain  that  in  his  political  tract  Prokopovich 
formally  deduced  from  popular  election  the  right  of 
Peter  to  change  "every  rite,  civil  and  religious,  every 


170  RUSSIA  AND  ITS  CRISIS 

custom,  whether  in  the  wearing  of  dresses,  or  in  the 
building  of  houses,  in  every  kind  of  ceremony  and  pre- 
scribed form  at  festivities,  nuptials,  burials,  and  so 
forth."  This  is  an  accurate  abstract  of  what  Peter 
really  did.  The  practice  as  well  as  the  theory  of  the 
absolute  monarchy  were,  now  that  autocracy  was  recast 
into  the  quite  new  and  more  modern  form  of  bureau- 
cratic absolutism,  quite  revolutionary.  The  power  of 
the  monarch,  as  well  as  the  habits  of  his  subjects,  were 
Europeanized  —  in  an  Asiatic  manner. 

The  next  step  in  the  legal  development  of  the  auto- 
cratic doctrine  was  taken  some  sixty  years  later,  when, 
during  the  reign  of  Catherine  II.,  a  truer  and  finer  sort 
of  enlightened  absolutism  prevailed  in  Russia.  This 
new  step  led  still  farther  away  from  the  accepted  Mus- 
covite doctrine  and,  accordingly,  from  the  old  tradi- 
tion. Catherine  II.  knew  and  shared  in  the  theory  of 
"the  law  of  nature,"  as  everybody  did  at  her  time. 
But  she  did  not  seem  to  know  that  a  deduction  might 
be  drawn  from  this  theory,  such  as  Hobbes  had  drawn 
and  Peter  had  practiced;  namely,  that  the  power  of 
the  people's  elected  is  absolute  and  unlimited.  By  her 
principles  she  was  not  absolutist ;  nay,  she  affirmed  that 
in  her  inner  conscience  she  was  republican.  But,  on 
the  other  hand,  Catherine  felt  a  positive  aversion  to 
the  other  extreme  deduction  from  the  theory  of 
"natural  law;"  namely,  Rousseau's  democratic  theory 
of  "the  social  contract."  She  held  rather  a  moderate 
variation  of  the  same  theory — that  of  Montesquieu,  her 
principal  teacher  in  politics.  She  was  very  glad  to 
know  from  Montesquieu  that  Russian  autocracy  ad- 
mitted of  what  was  then  called  a  "philosophical"  justi- 


THE  POLITICAL  TRADITION  171 

fication.  The  Russian  territory  was  so  much  extended, 
Montesquieu  taught,  that  no  other  form  of  govern- 
ment than  the  existing  was  there  possible.  And  this 
rationahstic  explanation  was  followed  by  a  rehabilita- 
tion of  autocracy,  which  was  as  agreeable  to  the  Rus- 
sian empress  as  it  had  been  to  the  king  of  France. 
The  courteous  writer  kindly  explained  to  both  that  a 
European  monarchy  need  not  be  humiliated  by  a  com- 
parison with  Asiatic  despotism.  European  monarchy 
had  originated  in  feudalism,  and  so  it  must  be  limited 
by  the  rights  and  privileges  of  different  social  orders, 
among  which  the  nobility  was  chief. 

There  was,  however,  as  we  have  seen,  no  feudalism 
and  not  much  of  a  nobility  in  Russia.  But  those  social 
orders  might  be  formed  anew  on  the  European  pattern ; 
and  Catherine  proceeded  to  form  such  privileged  orders 
as  Montesquieu  wished.  This  seemed  very  easy  to  do 
with  the  Russian  nobility,  which  was  then  in  its  ascend- 
ency, and  which  actually  was  the  only  influential  social 
power  likely  to  form  a  check  upon  despotism.  But  the 
same  reform  did  not  succeed  at  all  with  the  "  bourgeoi- 
sie," which  Catherine  II.  was  powerless  to  create. 
Lastly,  it  also  proved  impossible  with  the  peasants,  who 
had  to  be  left  as  serfs  of  the  nobility,  if  the  nobility  were 
to  be  favored.  In  fact,  the  position  of  the  peasants  was 
aggravated,  because  the  privileged  nobility  were  now 
no  longer  mere  "men  of  service"  dependent  on  the 
government ;  they  now  turned  their  former  land  grants 
and  military  tenures  into  an  entirely  private  property.^" 
A  self-government  of  the  nobility  was  begun  in  the 
country,  recalling  the  provincial  estates  of  France,  or 

"  See  p.  237. 


172  RUSSIA  AND  ITS  CRISIS 

the  land  diets  of  Germany.  Now  that  the  pouvoirs 
intermediaircs  of  Montesquieu — the  "intermediate 
powers"  between  the  people  and  the  throne — were  cre- 
ated in  the  provincial  government  and  in  the  social 
composition,  a  "true  monarchy"  could  be  realized  in 
Russia,  as  a  political  form  quite  opposed  to  an  oriental 
"despotism."  But  in  order  to  achieve  this  liberal  trans- 
formation, should  not  a  "true  monarchy"  be  organized 
as  a  "  limited  "  one? 

From  the  very  beginning  this  logical  issue  did  not 
seem  to  be  grasped  by  Catherine.  She  began  her  reign 
by  convoking  a  representative  assembly  elected  by  a 
large  vote,  but  she  never  thought  of  admitting  these 
deputies  to  share  her  power.  The  assembly  remained 
a  deliberative  one,  and  just  as  soon  as  it  showed  a 
tendency  toward  independence,  Catherine  used  the 
first  pretext  —  the  Turkish  war  —  to  send  away  the 
deputies.  Nevertheless,  for  long,  she  cherished  the 
idea  of  perpetuating  her  deputies  in  a  regular  central 
office,  as  Diderot  urged  her  to  do.  Finally,  how- 
ever, she  recoiled  from  this  plan.  The  only  remaining 
method  of  transforming  her  arbitrary  power  into  a 
regular  monarchy,  according  to  the  idea  of  Montes- 
quieu, consisted  in  drawing  a  sharp  line  between  the 
legislative  and  the  administrative  power.  But  even 
this  task  became  much  more  difficult — in  fact,  quite 
impossible — since  Catherine  had  renounced  her  former 
resolution  of  founding  a  representative  assembly.  For 
so  long  as  there  is  no  representation  there  can  be  no 
regular  legislation.  This  is  the  unvarnished  truth, 
which  the  subsequent  practice  of  Russian  political 
institutions    did    not    fail    to    confirm,    and    which    a 


THE  POLITICAL  TRADITION  173 

whole  century   of  persecution   has   not   been   able  to 
eradicate  from  public  opinion  in  Russia. 

But  let  us  see  now  what  was  done  for  the  further 
"self-improvement"  of  autocracy  during  this  last  cen- 
tury of  the  Russian  history.  The  nineteenth  century 
began  by  the  attempt  to  take  the  third  and  most  decisive 
step  from  theocratic  absolutism  to  legal  monarchy. 
Alexander  I.  mounted  the  throne  with  an  ardent  desire 
to  proclaim  the  rights  of  man  and  to  give  Russia  a 
constitution.  But  he  was  not  able  even  to  abolish  the 
most  crying  abuses  in  the  sale  of  serfs ;  and  he  thrice 
failed  in  his  endeavor  to  grant  his  subjects  a  constitu- 
tional charter.  On  the  first  occasion,  in  1801-2,  the 
affair  did  not  go  beyond  a  vague  and  general  discussion 
in  the  intimate  circle  of  some  few  friends.  But  the 
second  time,  in  1809,  Alexander  I.  went  farther." 
This  time  there  existed  a  definite  plan  of  reform, 
drawn  up  by  Speransky.  The  Tsar  had  begun  to  put 
this  plan  into  execution,  and  had  already  taken  the 
first  steps  when  he  suddenly  changed  his  mind,  and, 
yielding  to  the  pressure  of  Speransky's  enemies,  sent 
him  into  exile.  The  program  was  then  abandoned: 
and  so  the  only  institution  brought  into  existence  was 
the  Council  of  State.  It  had  now  to  take  the  place  of 
the  legislative  assembly  of  representatives  planned  by 
Speransky.  Until  the  present  time  this  council  has 
remained  the  chief  —  though  far  from  the  only^^ 

"It  was  then  that  he  addressed  himself  to  George  Washington, 
who  sent  him  a  copy  of  the  American  constitution. 

^-An  imperial  order  is  law  in  Russia  as  well  as  the  opinion  of 
the  State  Council  confirmed  by  his  majesty.  All  the  chief  measures 
of  the  two  last  reigns  were  taken  without  asking  for  the  "opinions" 
of  the  State  Council.     And  even  if  the  "opinion"  is  asked   for  and 


174  RUSSIA  AND  ITS  CRISIS 

legislative  body  in  the  Russian  empire.  In  1819,  for 
the  third  time,  the  draft  of  the  constitution  was 
worked  over  by  the  Tsar's  former  friend,  Novoseeltsov, 
who  was  assisted  by  a  French  lawyer,  Dechamps.  But 
though  this  was  done  by  the  Tsar's  explicit  order, 
Alexander  again  withheld  his  consent  at  the  last  mo- 
ment. He  had  just  then  come  under  the  influence  of 
Metternich,  who  is  known  to  have  been  anything  but 
favorable  to  free  institutions. 

Now  what,  we  may  ask,  was  the  reason  for  this  un- 
decided and  wavering  conduct  of  the  Russian  autocrat? 
Is  the  explanation  to  be  sought,  where  Speransky  was 
said  to  have  found  it,  in  the  personal  temper  of  the 
Tsar,  who  was  "trop  faible  pour  rcgir  et  trop  fort  pour 
etre  regi"?  Or  did  Alexander's  other  counselors  con- 
sider that  Russia  was  not  ripe  enough  for  a  constitu- 
tion? Or^  was  it  on  principle  that  they  opposed  any 
change  in  the  form  of  government?  Any  one  of  these 
three  reasons — the  personal  character  of  the  Tsar,  the 
real  unpreparedness  of  Russia,  the  nationalistic  opposi- 
tion of  the  partisans  of  autocracy — would  actually  ac- 
count for  the  failure.  But  what,  on  the  other  hand, 
was  the  theory  of  the  defenders  of  the  constitution? 
Their  theory  has  been  voiced  by  Speransky.  In  the 
introduction  to  his  draft  of  the  "constitution,"  he 
says:^^ 

At  every  epoch  the  form  of  government  must  correspond  to 
the  degree  of  civil  enlightenment  to  which  the  state  has  attained. 

given  the  emperor  is  not  bound  by  the  decision  of  its  majority. 
Emperor  Alexander  I.,  for  instance,  adopted  the  opinion  of  the 
minority  eighty-three  times  out  of  two  hundred  and  forty-two  times 
in  which  the  "opinions"  were  not  unanimous. 

"  The  following  quotation  is  a  little  shortened  from  the  original 
text  of  Speransky. 


THE  POLITICAL  TRADITION  175 

Whenever  the  form  of  government  is  too  slow  or  too  fast  to 
keep  pace  with  this  degree  of  enhghtenment,  it  is  overthrown 
with  more  or  less  commotion.  Thus  time  is  the  origin  of  every 
renovation  in  politics.  No  government  which  does  not  harmonize 
with  the  spirit  of  the  times  can  ever  stand  against  its  powerful 
action.  How  many  calamities,  how  much  blood,  could  be  spared, 
if  the  rulers  of  nations  would  observe  with  accuracy  the  move- 
ment of  public  opinion,  if  they  would  conform  to  it  the  principles 
of  their  systems  of  policy  and  adapt  the  government  to  the  state 
of  the  people,  instead  of  adapting  the  people  to  the  government ! 
And  see,  what  a  contradiction !  You  wish  that  sciences,  com- 
merce, ana  industry  should  be  developed,  and  you  do  not  admit 
their  most  natural  consequences;  you  desire  that  Reason  may 
be  free,  but  that  Will  should  be  fettered;  that  passions  may 
move  and  change,  but  that  the  object  of  these  passions— which  is 
freedom— should  remain  unapproachable;  that  people  should 
grow  rich,  but  that  they  may  not  use  the  best  fruit  of  their 
increase  of  wealth— liberty.  There  is  no  example  in  the  world 
of  an  enlightened  and  industrious  people's  remaining  any  length 
of  time  in  serfdom.  The  Russian  state  is  now  passing  through 
the  second  stage  of  the  feudal  system;  namely,  the  epoch  of 
autocracy.  Undoubtedly  it  is  tending  directly  to  freedom.  In 
part  this  tendency  is  even  more  straightforward  in  Russia  than  it 
was  in  other  countries.  The  unfailing  signs  of  it  are:  (i)  That 
people  lose  all  esteem  for  the  former  objects  of  their  veneration, 
e.  g.,  for  rank  and  honor.  (2)  The  action  of  power  is  so 
weakened  ....  that  no  measure  of  government  can  be  put  into 
operation  which  appeals  only  to  moral,  and  not  to  physical  con- 
straint. The  true  reason  of  this  is  that  at  present  public  opinion 
is  in  entire  contradiction  with  the  form  of  government.  (3)  No 
partial  reform  is  possible,  because  no  law  can  exist,  if  it  may 
any  day  be  overthrown  by  a  gust  of  arbitrary  power.  (4)  There 
is  a  general  discontent  to  be  observed,  such  as  can  only  be 
explained  by  a  complete  change  of  ideas,  and  by  a  repressed  but 
strong  desire  for  a  new  order  of  things.  For  all  these  reasons 
we  may  surely  conclude  that  the  actual  form  of  government  does 
not  correspond  to  the  state  of  popular  feeling,  and  that  the  time 
has  come  to  change  this  form  and  to  found  a  new  order  of 
things. 


1/6  RUSSIA  AND  ITS  CRISIS 

But  did  not  Speransky  rather  exaggerate  the  meas- 
ure in  which  the  popular  opinion  of  the  Russia  of  1809 
was  ready  for  constitutional  reform?  It  is  likely  that 
he  did.  But  then,  did  he  not  wish  to  start  the  reform 
in  time  to  prevent  bloodshed  and  popular  irritation? 
He  knew  how  to  read  the  "signs  of  the  times;''  and, 
indeed,  time  proved  his  forebodings  correct.  Hardly 
had  a  few  years  passed  after  he  had  uttered  this 
prophecy  before  blood  really  was  shed  on  the  streets  of 
St.  Petersburg,  and  the  first  martyrs  to  political  free- 
dom appeared  in  Russia — the  Decembrists  of  1825. 
Since  then  the  number  of  those  martyrs  has  enormously 
increased;  from  units  it  has  mounted  to  hundreds, 
thousands,  tens  of  thousands! 

Let  us  pass  over  this  century  of  political  struggle 
to  see  how,  since  the  time  of  Speransky,  public  opinion 
has  actually  become  more  embittered  and  violent  on 
the  subject  of  Russian  autocracy.  Let  me  now  quote 
the  speech  of  a  Russian  lawyer,  recently  delivered  in 
1903  at  the  trial  of  students  and  workingmen  who  were 
accused  of  having  taken  part  in  a  political  demonstra- 
tion in  the  city  of  Saratov.  Revolutionary  songs  w'ere 
there  sung  and  banners  hoisted,  bearing  such  inscrip- 
tions as  "Down  with  autocracy!"  This  was  a  spectacle 
very  different  from  that  wdiich  Petersburg  displayed 
in  the  year  1825;  and  this  comparison  alone  may  help 
you  to  realize  how  much  the  state  of  popular  feeling 
has  changed  during  the  course  of  one  century.  At  that 
time — three-quarters  of  a  century  ago — some  few  offi- 
cers of  aristocratic  birth  had  become  imbued  with  the 
tenets  of  liberalism  in  western  Europe  (during  the 
military  expeditions  of  181 3-1 5),  and  made  their  sub- 


THE  POLITICAL  TRADITION  177 

ordinate  soldiers  demonstrate,  without  having-  previ- 
ously trained  them  for  sympathy  with  their  political 
ideas;  they  chose  an  interregnum,  as  a  seasonable 
moment,  and  an  oath  of  fealty  to  the  very  power  they 
wished  to  dispossess  as  a  convenient  pretext,  for  their 
pronunciamento.  But  for  all  that  they  did  not  know 
what  to  do  with  the  forces  they  had  gathered  around 
them,  and  they  remained  irresolutely  in  one  place  the 
whole  day,  until  they  were  dispersed  by  a  few  salvos 
of  artillery.  Now,  in  the  Saratov  demonstration  of 
1903  we  see  only  the  small  part  of  a  great  move- 
ment, which  from  the  capital  has  spread  over  all  Rus- 
sia, gaining  adherents  even  among  the  lowest  levels 
of  society,  and  which  consciously  and  deliberately  pur- 
sues its  scheme  of  social  revolution.  Political  reform 
is  for  this  movement  only  the  first  and  easiest  means 
of  gaining  better  conditions  for  a  further,  more  success- 
ful struggle.  Let  us  listen  for  a  moment  to  the  argu- 
ment of  the  Russian  lawyer,  Mr.  Wolkenstein,  whose 
plea  was  in  defense  of  some  persons  accused  of  having 
"criticised  autocracy."  In  the  fragment  I  quote  the 
advocate  endeavors  to  show  what  the  criticising  of 
autocracy  really  means  at  the  present  time  in  Russia. 
Mr.  Wolkenstein  says : 

In  every  conscientious  text-book  of  state  law  you  may  find 
what  the  "criticising  of  autocracy"  means.  Who  "criticises" 
autocracy  "criticises"  its  evils :  bureaucracy,  centralization,  admin- 
istrative discretion,  denial  of  the  rights  of  individuality.  But  all 
this  is  in  our  time  everyday  talk,  words  that  have  become  truisms. 
Open  any  newspaper  you  like,  even  a  most  reactionary  one. 
Should  it  be  a  question  concerning  school  reform,  you  may  find 
such  remarks  as  follows :  Our  school  has  become  dead  under  the 
pressure   of  bureaucracy.     And   what   about   the  budget?     The 


178  RUSSIA  AND  ITS  CRISIS 

press,  coerced  by  censors,  still  criticises  openly  the  system  of 
taxation,  whose  whole  weight  rests  upon  the  hungering  mass 
of  paupers.  Is  it  not  a  criticism  of  the  regime?  Are  not  finance 
and  taxation  the  chief  center  of  the  nervous  system  of  the  state? 
Is  it  not  by  this  very  protest  against  the  despotic  and  arbitrary 
collection  of  taxes  and  the  manner  of  spending  the  money  col- 
lected that  nations  always  begin  their  struggle  for  political 
liberty?  Do  you  not  hear  the  voices  resounding  from  every- 
where :  from  shires  and  counties,  from  province  and  capital,  from 
cities  and  villages — from  every  corner  of  the  nation?  These 
speeches  about  the  equalization  of  the  rights  of  every  station, 
about  the  abolition  of  arbitrary  administration,  about  the  emanci- 
pation from  administrative  tutelage,  about  the  nationalizing  of 
land — is  not  all  this  a  condemnation  of  the  existing  regime? 
Now,  these  speeches  form  the  reply  of  the  educated  class  to  the 
question  which  recently  posed  the  government  —  as  to  where 
poverty  and  famine  come  from.  Do  not  these  speeches  violate 
Article  252  of  the  Statute  of  Penalties?  [This  was  the  founda- 
tion of  the  accusation  made  by  the  state's  attorney.]  But  the 
government  keeps  silence  and  listens  to  such  speeches. 

It  keeps  silence,  too,  toward  the  loud  voice  of  the  Russian 
nation !  This  voice  claims  a  share  in  legislation.  Is  this  also  no 
condemnation  of  the  established  order  of  the  state? 

And  such  voices  resound  often  and  oftener.  Bend  your  ear 
and  you  shall  hear  how  they  murmur!  And  how  persistent,  and 
how  bold !  Twenty  years  ago  they  were  answered  by  a  repression 
of  what  was  called  the  "anarchy  in  provincial  councils."  Seven 
years  ago  there  rang  concerning  these  "dreams"  a  threatening 
veto  of  one  [the  Tsar]  whose  word  is  law  for  the  empire."  And 
now  the  only  reply  to  these  voices  is — silence!  Meanwhile  the 
press,  muzzled  though  it  is  by  the  censorship,  asks  for  a  general 
representative  assembly  of  the  land — the  Zemsky  Sobor;  it  pro- 
claims the  "people's  council"  in  1903. 

"  The  advocate  refers  here  to  a  phrase  pronounced  by  the  Tsar 
in  the  beginning  of  his  reign.  "  Senseless  dreams  "  was  the  qualifica- 
tion of  liberal  aspirations  by  the  young  sovereign,  in  a  speech  which 
is  generally  supposed  to  have  been  prepared  for  the  Tsar  by  Mr. 
Pobedonostsev,  and  which  was  pronounced  before  an  audience  of 
land-marshals,  come  to  congratulate  the  Tsar  on  his  coronation. 


THE  POLITICAL  TRADITION  I79 

Life  changes.  Authority  also  changes  its  view.  At  last  there 
comes  a  time  when  authority  gives  ear  to  such  things  as  were 
forbidden  even  to  be  spoken  in  a  whisper. 

Gentlemen  of  the  jury,  you  have  just  been  told  that  your 
sentence  will  put  an  end  to  the  demonstrations;  that  demon- 
strations disturb  general  tranquillity  and  unsettle  people's  well- 
being.  Well,  I  assert  the  contrary!  Apart  from  the  demon- 
strations you  will  find  no  tranquillity  in  Russian  society.  The 
fermentation  is  spread  everywhere.  The  people  here  accused' 
are  guilty  only  of  having  spoken  aloud  what  is  said  in  a 
thousand  ways  everywhere.  Through  the  impermeable  muteness 
of  our  life,  through  all  its  pores,  oozes  criticism  of  the  regime. 
A  criticism  of  the  existing  order  bursts  forth  roaring  and 
whistling  through  every  crack  and  gap.  That  is  what  these  men 
have  seen  and  heard.  And  therefore  they  hoisted  their  red 
banner.  You  may  convict  them.  But  then  you  must  realize  that 
together  with  them  tens,  nay  hundreds,  of  thousands  of  Russian 
citizens  are  being  judged. 

This  lawyer's  speech,  delivered  in  one  of  the  late 
political  trials,  shows  clearly  what  is  the  general  feeling 
toward  autocracy  in  Russia,  and  in  the  face  of  such 
growing  irritation  autocracy  has  completely  changed 
its  tactics.  In  the  period  from  Peter  the  Great  until 
Alexander  I.  we  saw  it  passing  through  a  process  of 
self-improvement.  Henceforth,  we  observe  it  in  the 
stages  of  another  process:  that  of  self-preservation. 
When  the  Tsar  Alexander  I.  visited  England  in  1814, 
he  spoke  enthusiastically  to  the  Whigs  of  the  necessity 
of  forming  an  opposition  in  Russia,  in  order  that  a 
parliamentary  government  might  be  started.  Two 
years  later  his  younger  brother,  Nicholas,  when  on  the 
rjoint  of  visiting  England,  received  instructions  in 
^A^hich  he  was  told  not  to  imagine  that  it  would  be  pos- 
sible to  copy  an  organic  development  like  the  English 
constitution,    in   quite   another   climate   and    different 


i8o  RUSSIA  AND  ITS  CRISIS 

surroundings.  This  fragment  of  a  nationalistic  view 
became  the  poHtical  theory  which  was  used  by  the 
government  in  self-defense  just  at  the  moment  when 
an  actual  "opposition"  appeared  in  Russia. 

The  full  blossoming  of  nationalistic  theory,  as  we 
already  know,  coincided  with  the  reign  of  Nicholas  I. 
(1825-55).  Then  the  nationalistic  doctrine  of  Slavo- 
philism was  built. ^^  Now,  the  government  of  Nicholas, 
in  its  system  of  self-preservation,  surpassed  by  far  the 
nationalistic  theory  of  the  Slavophils.  Conservative 
though  this  theory  was,  it  started  from  the  notion  of 
the  national  "spirit"  of  the  people  as  a  living  force,  as 
an  active  and  creative  power  not  to  be  stopped  or  ruled 
by  state  policy  or  by  the  measures  of  the  police.  The 
authority  of  the  state,  to  be  sure,  was  fully  recognized 
by  the  Slavophils,  but  their  idea  of  what  a  state  had 
to  be  was  not  a  flattering  one.  The  state  was  some- 
thing like  the  "flesh"  in  Greek  philosophy  and  in 
Christian  morals;  it  was  a  principle  of  sin  and  evil; 
and  it  had  to  be  kept  far  from  the  free  life  of  spirit ;  its 
only  right  and  duty  was  to  secure  to  the  spirit  the  full 
enjoyment  of  its  inner  freedom.  No  wonder  that  this 
kind  of  nationalistic  theory  could  not  be  adopted  by 
the  government;  on  the  contrary,  it  had  become  sus- 
pected of  democratism,  and  its  supporters  had  them- 
selves to  experience  what  the  actual  policy  of  a  national- 
istic reaction  was.  Their  periodicals  were  forbidden, 
all  their  writings  submitted  to  a  special  censorship, 
their  persons  were  put  under  the  strictest  surveillance 
of  the  police.^"     What  the  government  really  wanted 

^  See  pp.  52-57- 

"  See    pp.    365,    366,    where    radical    and    democratic    deductions 
from  Slavophilism  are  shown. 


THE  POLITICAL  TRADITION  i8i 

in  the  way  of  a  nationalistic  theory  it  formulated  for 
itself.  This  was  the  doctrine  of  "official  nationalism/' 
poor  and  scanty  as  a  political  theory,  but  quite  oper- 
ative as  a  means  for  carrying  out  a  policy  of  thought- 
less immobility  and  reaction. 

Such  a  theory  did  not  need  to  be  developed  in 
political  pamphlets  or  in  learned  treatises.  It  found 
expression  in  manifestos  and  official  reports.  The 
most  discursive  exposition  of  it  belongs  to  the  minister 
of  public  instruction,  Count  Ouvarov,  who  is  gener- 
ally accepted  as  the  founder  of  the  theory  of  "official 
nationalism."  To  make  you  realize  its  tenets  as  well 
as  its  political  meaning,  I  cannot  do  better  than  to 
quote  from  a  report  to  the  Tsar  by  Ouvarov,  which  was 
written  at  the  beginning  of  his  ministerial  activity,  the 
new  nationalistic  area,  1833.  I"  his  pompous  and 
flourishing  style,  he  writes : 

While  contemplating  the  problem  which  was  to  be  imme- 
diately solved  —  a  problem  closely  connected  with  the  future 
of  our  fatherland — the  mind  involuntarily  gave  way  almost  to 
despair  and  it  wavered  in  its  conclusions,  while  considering  the 
social  tempest,  which  was  making  Europe  tremble  and  whose 
reverberations,  more  or  less  strong,  reached  us  and  threatened 
us,  as  an  impending  danger.  In  the  midst  of  religious  and  civil 
institutions  rapidly  on  the  decline  in  Europe,  keeping  in  view  the 
universal  spread  of  subversive  ideas  and  attending  to  distressing 
events  that  were  happening  at  every  step,  it  was  necessary  to 
establish  the  fatherland  on  those  stable  foundations  on  which 
the  welfare,  the  strength,  and  the  life  of  the  nation  are  generally, 
built;  it  was  necessary  to  discover  such  principles  as  beonged 
exclusively  to  Russia— those  principles  which  formed  its  pecu- 
liar characteristics;  to  gather  in  one  the  sacred  remainders  of 
its  nationality,  and  there  to  anchor  our  hopes  of  salvation. 
Happily    Russia   has    preserved   a    warm    faith    in    the    salutary 


i82  RUSSIA  AND  ITS  CRISIS 

principles  without  which  it  cannot  prosper,  grow  stronger,  nay 
even  live.  While  deeply  and  sincerely  attached  to  the  church 
of  his  fathers,  a  Russian  always  thought  of  his  church  as  a 
covenant  of  social  and  family  welfare.  Without  love  for  the 
belief  of  his  forefathers,  the  nation  as  well  as  the  individual  must 
perish.  A  Russian  who  is  devoted  to  his  native  country  would 
not  acquiesce  in  the  loss  of  any  of  the  dogmas  of  our  Orthodoxy, 
or  agree  to  be  robbed  of  one  of  the  pearls  in  the  diadem  of 
Monomach."  Autocracy  is  the  chief  condition  of  the  political 
existence  of  Russia.  The  Russian  giant  rests  on  it,  as  on  the 
corner-stone  of  his  greatness.  And  besides  these  two  national 
principles  there  is  a  third  not  less  important :  that  of  nationality. 
The  question  of  nationality  is  more  complex  than  the  previous 
one;  but  both  originate  in  the  same  source  and  are  united  on 
every  page  of  Russian  history.  The  difficulty  consists  here  in 
reconciling  the  old  and  the  new  ideas  about  nationality.  But  the 
principle  of  nationality  does  not  necessarily  imply  standing  still 
or  going  back;  it  does  not  demand  immutability  of  ideas.  The 
state  composition,  like  the  human  body,  changes  its  outward 
aspect  with  age:  features  are  changed,  but  the  general  physiog- 
nomy ought  not  to  be  changed.  It  would  be  improper  to  resist 
the  periodic  march  of  things;  it  is  enough  if  we  may  preserve 
untouched  the  sanctuary  of  Russian  popular  notions,  in  order  to 
take  them  for  a  fundamental  idea  of  government. 

Thus  appeared,  immediately  after  the  European 
revokitions  of  1830-31,  the  famous  trinity  of  the  Rus- 
sian official  nationalism  :  autocracy.  Orthodoxy,  and  — 
in  as  bad  logical  as  material  co-ordination — nationality. 
Since  that  time  the  Russian  government  has  never 
renounced  this  doctrine,  and  Russian  public  opinion 
has  never  in  the  struggle  against  it  given  in,  excepting, 
perhaps,  a  few  years  at  the  beginning  of  the  reign  of 
Alexander  11. ,  when  the  preparations  for  the  emanci- 
pation of  the  peasants  were  going  on.    With  this  one 

"One  of  the  insignia,  mentioned  on  p.  164. 


THE  POLITICAL  TRADITION  183 

exception,  the  whole  period  of  the  last  three-quarters 
of  a  century  may  be  called  one  epoch  of  lasting  con- 
flict between  government  and  public  opinion.  Many 
things  that  would  be  found  abnormal  in  every  civilized 
country  have  become  quite  normal  and  customary  dur- 
ing this  long  progress  of  political  struggle  in  Russia. 
What  the  ideas  and  the  active  forces  of  public  opinion 
are  we  shall  see  presently.  But  for  the  present  we 
have  to  consider  what  were  the  means  resorted  to  by 
the  Russian  government,  in  order  to  keep  back  the 
increasing  current  of  opposition.  Seeing  how  severe 
these  means  were,  we  shall  be  able  to  judge  of  the 
strength  of  the  movement  that  the  government  was 
trying  to  fetter.  You  know,  perhaps,  that  at  the  end 
of  March,  1903,  two  imperial  edicts  gave  a  kind  of 
dictatorial  power  to  the  governor-general  of  Finland. 
By  this  new  instruction  he  not  only  was  entitled  to 
control  and  to  direct  every  office  and  public  institution 
in  the  country,  including  the  elective  ones,  to  permit 
and  to  stop  public  meetings  and  the  collection  of  money 
for  whatever  object,  to  control  public  and  private 
instruction,  and  so  forth,  but  he  also  received,  by  a 
temporary  statute,  such  full  powers  as  befit  a  formal 
state  of  war:  he  is  now  free  to  arrest  and  to  exile 
persons  whom  he  finds  dangerous  to  the  general  tran- 
quillity, to  seize  property,  to  close  any  establishment 
of  trade  and  commerce,  to  deprive  any  official,  even 
an  elected  one,  of  his  office. 

For  a  country  like  Finland — a  country  that  has 
been  accustomed  to  be  ruled  by  law — such  measures 
as  these  are  nothing  short  of  revolutionary.  The 
legal   regime   is   at   once  overthrown    by    regulations 


i84  RUSSIA  AND  ITS  CRISIS 

which,  in  the  eyes  of  the  people,  not  having  received 
sanction  from  the  popular  representatives,  cannot 
represent  lav^^  either  by  their  form  or  by  their  origin. 
Now  in  Russia  a  like  state  of  things,  revolutionary 
though  it  may  be  in  its  essence,  has  existed  for  years; 
and,  as  people  have  never  known  what  a  legal  regime 
in  politics  really  is,  the  same  discretionary  power  does 
not  bring  about  nearly  so  much  irritation  as  one  might 
think.  Nay,  there  are  people,  there  are  even  some 
writers  on  politics,  who  find  that  even  such  arbitrary 
rule,  when  it  is  thus  founded  on  edicts  and  "tem- 
porary" regulations,  is  better  than  a  paternal  regime 
of  unbounded  autocracy,  just  because  it  is  a  step  for- 
ward toward  a  state  of  legality;  at  least,  arbitrary 
power  is  thus  publicly  proclaimed  abnormal,  and  con- 
fined within  certain  more  or  less  definite  limits. 

In  fact,  the  discretionary  power  of  the  Russian 
government,  having  been  formally  extended  by  stat- 
utes, has  become  more  clearly  defined,  and  thus  in  a 
way  more  limited.  But  this  certainly  was  not  the  aim 
•  of  the  authorities  who  wished  their  powers  rather  to 
be  enlarged.  The  direct  purpose  was  always  to  give 
the  government  some  additional  weapon  in  its  inter- 
minable struggle  against  public  opinion.  A  short 
survey  of  historical  facts  will  suffice  to  prove  this 
assertion. 

The  first  time  that  the  ordinary — the  "executive" 
— police  were  found  insufificient  for  the  preservation 
of  the  general  tranquillity  was  at  the  time  of  the 
military  rebellion  of  St.  Petersburg  in  1825 — the 
"December"  mutiny.  A  contemporary.  Count  Lafer- 
ronnais,  the  French  ambassador,  testified  as  follows 
concerning  the  general  tendency  of  public  opinion : 


THE  POLITICAL  TRADITION  185 

The  chief  evil  is  that  even  the  most  prudent  of  men,  such 
as  looked  with  horror  and  disgust  upon  the  events,  think  and 
say  aloud  that  reforms  are  necessary,  that  a  code  is  wanted, 
that  forms  and  principles  of  justice  must  be  entirely  altered,  that 
peasants  are  to  be  protected  from  the  insupportable  arbitrary 
power  of  their  lords,  that  it  is  dangerous  to  remain  stationary, 
that  it  is  quite  necessary  to  follow  —  if  only  at  some  distance — 
the  progress  of  time,  and  to  prepare,  though  slowly,  for  more 
decisive  changes. 

Such  was  also,  as  we  know,  the  opinion  of  Speran- 
sky.  But  such  was  not,  of  course,  the  opinion  of  the 
emperor,  Nicholas  I.  "Miserably  educated,"  accord- 
ing to  his  own  statement,  and  fond  of  military  disci- 
pline and  obedience,  he  did  not  realize  the  necessity,  so 
clear  to  Speransky,  of  following  the  progress  of  the 
time.  Yet  even  Nicholas  understood  that  absolute 
monarchy  was  powerless  to  control  the  abuses  of 
bureaucracy,  and  that  some  extraordinary  measures 
must  be  taken,  if  robbery,  embezzlement,  and  the  other 
vices  of  a  bureaucratic  regime  were  to  be  done  away 
with.  It  was  to  improve  these  bureaucratic  abuses 
that  the  secret  society  of  the  "Decembrists"  had  been 
started  some  years  before.^*  Now  that  its  members 
were  hanged  or  exiled,  Nicholas  resolved  to  recur  to 
another  kind  of  secret  redress  for  public  wrongs  — 
the  kind  that  had  been  used  by  oriental  monarchs 
more  than  once.  He  founded — or  rather  he  reformed 
—  the  system  of  close  surveillance  both  of  society  and 
of  state  officials  by  means  of  a  special  body  of  the 
state  police,  who  should  be  the  "ears"  and  the  "eyes" 
of  the  Tsar.  The  chief  of  this  "separate  corps  of 
gendarmes"  was  at  the  same  time  the  chief  of  the 

"  See  pp.  254-59. 


i86  RUSSIA  AND  ITS  CRISIS 

"Third  Section  of  His  Majesty's  Private  Chancery," 
and  as  such  stood  in  close  and  immediate  relation  to 
the  monarch.  The  subordinate  officers  were  scattered 
all  over  the  country,  and  had  to  correspond  with  their 
chief  on  the  subject  of  private  morals  and  public 
grievances. 

The  system  was  founded  on  the  supposition  that 
the  superior  policemen  were  to  be  superior  men  —  a 
supposition  which  proved  to  be  very  hazardous.  In 
fact,  the  new  set  of  officials  were  on  quite  the  same 
level  as  the  old  ones.  Thus  the  system  of  bribery 
and  embezzlement  was  not  broken,  but  only  strength- 
ened by  a  fresh  link  in  the  chain,  and  a  more  impor- 
tant one,  because  the  members  of  the  superior  police 
in  the  provinces  were  surrounded  by  a  halo  of  the 
mysterious  and  irresponsible  power  from  which  they 
drew  their  origin.  Thus,  though  the  original  aim 
was  not  attained,  the  "blue  coats"  of  the  gendarmerie 
were  soon  found  to  form  a  most  essential  spring  of 
absolute  power.  Every  illegal  action  against  person 
and  property  has  since  been  carried  out  with  their 
help.  Had  an  influential  person  to  extricate  him- 
self from  some  complicated  pecuniary  or  family  affairs 
that  were  not  to  be  divulged  or  were  not  expected 
to  be  untangled  to  his  satisfaction  in  the  ordi- 
nary courts,  by  the  current  law,  the  officers  of  the 
"Third  Section"  were  there  to  relieve — not  orphans 
and  widows,  as  they  were  supposed  to — but  the  op- 
pressor at  the  cost  of  his  victim.  It  was  like  the 
lettres  de  cachet  of  the  ancien  regime  in  France. 
Again,  had  a  too  popular  writer,  or  a  too  successful 
sectarian  chief,  an  applauded  actor  or  actress,  or  even 


THE  POLITICAL  TRADITION  187 

an  influential  official,  to  be  removed  from  his  scene 
of  action  and  made  harmless,  a  secret  order  was  im- 
mediately given,  and  the  person  in  question  suddenly 
disappeared  in  the  darkness  of  night,  to  reappear  some 
days  afterward  in  some  remote  corner  of  Russia.  All 
these  were  manifestations  of  the  paternal  tutelage 
which  Nicholas  I.  claimed  over  his  subjects  as  a 
constituent  part  of  the  absolute  power  inherited  from 
his  predecessors. 

It  is  easy  to  understand  why  the  "Third  Section" 
was  hated  by  everybody  and  soon  became  proverbial 
as  the  incarnation  of  the  Russian  autocratic  regime. 
It  was  supposed  to  fall  into  disuse,  as  a  victim  of  this 
general  hatred,  when  the  liberal  reforms  of  Alexander 
II.  began;  but,  in  fact,  it  was  abolished  only  in  the 
last  year  of  his  reign  (1880),  after  having  served  the 
new  wants  of  the  government,  and  it  only  gave  place 
to  new  institutions  of  a  similar  kind  which  were 
found  to  be  more  appropriate  to  the  new  requirements 
for  the  self-defense  of  autocracy. 

The  new  measures  just  hinted  at  were  called  into 
existence  by  a  new  period  of  struggle  between  the 
government  and  the  revolutionists  in  the  decade  1870- 
80.  The  general  situation  which  made  the  govern- 
ment feel  very  strongly  the  necessity  for  new  "bills 
of  coercion"  is  clearly  represented  by  the  minister  of 
the  interior,  Valooyev,  in  his  report  to  the  Committee 
of  the  Ministers  of  1879.  We  may  compare  his  avowal 
with  the  testimony  of  Laferronnais,  quoted  above: 

We  must  not  exaggerate  the  importance  of  the  difficulties 
and  dangers  to  be  conibatted;  still  the  situation  is  rather  em- 
barrassing.    A  very  bad  sign  is,  first  of  all,  such  indifference  as 


i88  RUSSIA  AND  ITS  CRISIS 

is  shown  by  nearly  all  more  or  less  educated  people  regarding 
the  struggle  of  the  government  against  a  comparatively  small 
number  of  malefactors  [i.  e.,  revolutionists].  The  majority  of  the 
population  is  agitated,  but  it  seems  to  wait  for  the  issue  of  the 
struggle,  while  not  sharing  in  it  and  not  taking  the  side  of  the 
government.  Moreover,  the  general  public  are  nearly  always 
badly  disposed  toward  the  orders  of  the  authorities,  while  they 
find  the  measures  that  are  taken  sometimes  too  weak,  sometimes 
too  oppressive.  As  regards  the  masses,  who  either  do  not  reason 
at  all  or  who  reason  insufficiently,  among  them  two  different 
inclinations  may  be  observed.  They  are  ready  to  help  when  first 
called;  but  their  assistance  is  disorderly  and  violent,  bordering 
on  arbitrariness,  and  so  is  too  dangerous  to  be  relied  upon.  At 
the  same  time  these  masses  are  accessible  to  every  promise  that 
is  held  out  to  them  of  material  profits  or  of  new  franchises ;  and 
when  influenced  by  such  promises  they  are  always  ready  to 
refuse  obedience  to  their  immediate  authorities. 

Under  these  circumstances  no  moral  help  from  the 
side  of  the  populace  could  be  hoped  for,  and  a  set  of 
new  measures  were  taken  in  order  to  enlarge  the  power 
of  the  local  authorities.  No  less  than  twenty  edicts 
concerning  those  measures  were  then  codified  into  a 
kind  of  system  in  1881  and,  without  being  trans- 
formed into  standing  law,  were  published  as  a  decree 
of  the  Committee  of  Ministers  approved  by  the  emperor 
to  be  applied  as  "temporary"  regulations.  But  since 
then  these  "Regulations  Concerning  Enforced  and 
Extraordinary  Protection"  have  remained  a  Russian 
habeas  corpus.  They  correspond  pretty  nearly  to  what 
is  understood  in  Prussia  by  the  phrase  "small  state  of 
siege"  and  "great  state  of  siege."  And  even  during 
these  last  few  years,  when  the  situation  has  again  been 
very  much  aggravated,  even  when  compared  with  the 
decennium   1873-84,  the  statute  seems  to  be  on  the 


Districts  and 

Provinces. 
_.   Separate  Cities 

and  Towns. 
^3  Districts  and 
^3  Provinces. 
^»  Separate  Cities 

and  Towns. 


Under  the  "Enforced  Protection." 


Where  meetings  are  particularly  forbidden.     (Art.  421.) 


THE  POLITICAL  TRADITION  189 

point  of  being  enriched  by  new  methods  of  adminis- 
trative oppression  and  by  the  use  of  miHtary  force. ^^ 
Let  us  now  see  what  the  combined  result  of  all 
these  "temporary"  measures  of  the  state  policy  is — 
measures  which  have  formed  a  real  tradition  during 
the  last  three  quarters  of  the  century.  First,  these 
measures  have  multiplied  exceedingly  the  number  of 
institutions  and  persons  whose  particular  duty  it  is  to 
observe,  to  discover,  and  to  punish  political  offenses. 
If  you  live  in  either  of  the  two  capital  cities  of  Russia, 
and  if  you  have  the  bad  luck  of  manifesting  political 
activity,  you  may  be  traced  by  one  of  these  institu- 
tions, questioned  by  the  second,  and  punished  by  the 
third;  although  none  of  them  have  anything  to  do 
with  the  general  courts  of  justice.  The  honorable 
office  which  watches  your  doings  and  sayings  is 
the  Ohrannoye  Otdclaineye  of  the  prefect  of  the  city 
or  the  "Department  for  Protection."  Its  agents  are 
very  numerous;  they  are  scattered  everywhere — in 
schools  and  universities  among  the  students,  in  editors' 
offices  among  the  journalists,  in  social  gatherings,  in 
railway  stations,  in  the  most  frequented  streets,  in 
factories  among  the  workingmen,  even  in  revolu- 
tionary circles  and  social-democratic  organizations,  in 
private  circles  for  self-culture,  and  among  the  young 
people  of  the  middle  schools.  What  Tacitus  says 
about  the  dclatorcs  of  the  time  of  Tiberius  and  Nero 
is  trifling  in  comparison  with  the  large  system  of 
denunciation  actually  at  work  in  Russia. 

Authorities  who  use  this   system   are  themselves 

"  On  the  map  one  may  see  how  lar},'e  is  that  part  of  the  empire 
in  which  the  state  of  siege  is  continuous. 


igo  RUSSIA  AND  ITS  CRISIS 

sometimes  bewildered  by  its  extent,  and  by  the  quality 
of  the  implements;  I  myself  have  heard  the  gen- 
darmes, the  representatives  of  the  former  "  Third  Sec- 
tion," boast  their  pride  in  that  they  no  longer  form  a 
part  of  the  system,  since  the  Ohrana  has  been  formed. 
Unhappily,  they  are  not  entirely  right  in  their  boast, 
since  their  fellow-workers  do  the  same  thing  in  the  Rus- 
sian provinces,  where  no  agents  of  the  Ohrana  exist. 
And  in  the  cities  they  perform  the  function  of  formal 
inquiry,  the  second  step  after  a  person  has  been  tracked 
by  the  spies  of  the  Ohrana.  Thus,  even  where  the 
gendarmes  are  not  spies  and  detectives,  they  are  in- 
quirers and — very  often — inquisitors.  While  making 
inquiry,  these  agents  do  not  produce  the  evidence  of 
your  accusation ;  they  try  to  conceal  as  much  of  what 
they  know  about  you  as  possible.  They  ask  you 
simply  to  avow  what  they  do  not  yet  know,  and  in 
order  to  induce  you  to  the  avowal  they  use  tricks  such 
as  would  never  be  permitted  in  a  regular  court  of 
justice.  The  inexperienced  and  the  least  guilty  always 
run  the  risk  of  aggravating  their  position,  and  even 
of  being  convicted  of  quite  imaginary  faults,  by  break- 
ing down  before  this  Jesuitic  system  of  inquiry.  The 
more  experienced  abstain  now  more  and  more  from 
giving  any  answers.  A  representative  of  regular 
justice,  who  is  obliged  by  law  to  assist  at  this  trial,  is 
in  fact  rarely  present. 

In  theory,  the  case,  when  stated  by  organs  of  pre- 
vious inquiry,  must  then  be  sent  over  to  an  ordinary 
court,  in  order  to  be  pleaded  before  the  jury.  But,  as 
a  matter  of  fact,  this  hardly  ever  happens.  The  regu- 
lar Russian  courts,  founded  in  1864,  have  been  proved 


THE  POLITICAL  TRADITION  191 

too  independent  and  liberal.  In  1878  they  declared 
Vera  Zasoolich  not  guilty — a  girl  who  had  fired  at 
the  prefect  of  Petersburg,  General  Trepov,  after  hav- 
ing read  in  the  newspapers  that  he  had  had  one  of  the 
political  prisoners  flogged.  Since  then,  by  a  set  of 
imperial  orders,  special  courts  have  been  introduced, 
and  governors-general  have  been  given  the  right  of 
transferring  political  crimes  to  the  courts  martial. 
But  even  these  special  tribunals  presently  fell  into 
disuse.  This  is  due  partly  to  the  desire  of  the  govern- 
ment to  avoid  every  public  discussion  of  politics,  be- 
cause special  courts",  though  made  inaccessible  to  the 
general  public,  yet  gave  to  the  accused  and  to  their 
advocates  the  chance  of  an  open  defense,  which  could 
then  be  made  public  through  the  channel  of  the 
clandestine  press. 

But  this  disuse  of  judicial  procedure  appears  also  to 
have  been  partly  the  necessary  consequence  of  an  enor- 
mous disproportion  between  the  insignificance  of  politi- 
cal offenses  and  the  barbarity  of  the  punishments  which 
were  to  be  inflicted  for  them,  if  the  legal  procedure  had 
to  be  resorted  to.  Political  criminals  have  now  grown 
too  many,  and  political  crimes  have  grown  too  ordi- 
nary, to  be  punished  by  forced  labor  or  prolonged  im- 
prisonment, as  the  antiquated  Russian  code  demanded. 
Thus  a  new  tribunal  was  formed  by  the  "  Statute  of 
Protection"  of  1881,  composed  of  two  representatives 
of  the  ministry  of  the  interior  and  as  many  from  the 
ministry  of  justice.  They  have  to  sit  on  every  case 
not  judged  important  enough  to  call  for  one  of  the 
grave  punishments  of  the  law,  or  in  which  the  proofs 
of  guilt  are  not  so  evident  as  to  be  accepted  as  such  by 


192  RUSSIA  AND  ITS  CRISIS 

the  regular  court.  These  judges  do  not  see  the  accused, 
do  not  hear  the  witnesses,  and  do  not  listen  to  any 
defense.  Their  only  material  for  judgment  is  that  col- 
lected by  the  gendarmerie  inquest.  This  secret  tribunal, 
called  "  The  Particular  Consultation,"  is  authorized  to 
sentence  to  an  administrative  exile  of  not  more  than  five 
years.  But  in  reality  it  does  not  observe  this  limit  very 
strictly ;  it  inflicts  sometimes  an  exile  of  from  eight  to 
ten  years,  and  even  imprisonment,  though,  of  course, 
this  needs  an  imperial  confirmation. 

Just  now^*^  a  new  criminal  code  is  to  be  published, 
in  which  punishments  for  political  crimes  are  not  much 
alleviated,  but  the  crimes  themselves  are  dealt  with  in  a 
more  detailed  and  modern  manner.  Some  new  attempts 
were  also  made  to  judge  political  crimes  by  tribunals — 
special  ones,  of  course.  But  it  does  not  seem  that  this 
experiment  of  comparative  "  legality  "  can  be  put  into 
practice.  Until  the  possibility  of  a  more  consistent 
legal  state  of  things  is  acknowledged,  the  "  Particular 
Consultation  ''  is  destined  to  be  perpetuated.  Until  then 
also  the  police  department  of  the  ministry  of  the 
interior  will  continue  virtually  to  judge  political 
crimes.  Some  people  find  a  kind  of  progress  of  legality 
even  in  this  order  of  things,  when  compared  with  the 
old  regime  of  the  "Third  Section  of  His  Majesty's 
Chancery."  And,  indeed,  there  is  a  kind  of  formal 
procedure  in  what  has  just  been  described.  We  see, 
then,  that  here  too  the  personal  regime  has  given  place 
to  a  system  of  legalized  arbitrariness.  But  it  may  be 
doubted  whether  the  arbitrary  power  of  the  superior 
police  becomes  more  legal  after  it  has  been  outwardly 

="July,   1903. 


THE  POLITICAL  TRADITION  193 

separated  from  its  real  origin — the  arbitrary  power 
of  the  sovereign.  The  emperor  Nicholas  I.,  of  course, 
would  have  been  jealous  of  this  particular  kind  of 
division  of  powers,  he  who  knew  well  where  the  line 
of  demarkation  lies  between  the  autocracy  of  the  mon- 
arch and  the  autocracy  of  bureaucracy.  But,  as  things 
now  are,  the  actual  division  of  power  between  autoc- 
racy and  the  state  police  is  quite  necessary,  and  even 
such  a  Don  Quixote  of  autocracy  as  was  Nicholas  I. 
could  not  have  found  any  other  way  of  escape  from 
this  division  than  to  try  a  more  dignified  and  honest 
one;  namely,  by  sharing  his  power  with  his  people 
instead  of  with  the  police.^^ 

We  know  now  what  is  the  part  of  the  Ohrana,  of 
the  gendarmerie,  and  of  the  police  department  in  their 
business  of  observation  of  Russian  citizens.  But  this 
is  far  from  all  that  can  be  said  about  the  matter. 
We  have  not  said  anything  about  the  army  of  spies 
who  are  directed  by  the  provincial  gendarmerie  offi- 
cers ;  another  army  of  the  agents  of  the  police  depart- 
ment who  are  entitled  to  control  the  former;  and  a 
third,  much  more  numerous,  army  of  "janitors"  who 
are  also  made  obligatory  agents  of  the  political  police; 
and  a  fourth,  still  more  numerous,  army  of  thirty-five 
thousand  guardians  now  on  the  point  of  being  sta- 
tioned in  the  villages,  because  during  the  last  few 
years  the  peasants  have  npt,  to  use  the  conventional 

"'  I  need  hardly  say  how  many  are  the  facilities  for  black- 
mailing and  other  abuse  of  power  which  their  exceptional  position 
and  their  utter  lack  of  responsibilty  give  to  these  secret  state  police. 
It  is  difficult  to  realize  how  often,  particularly  in  the  provinces,  the 
state  police  have  used  their  power  to  the  satisfaction  of  personal 
revenge. 


194  RUSSIA  AND  ITS  CRISIS 

term  of  the  Russian  police,  proved  quite  "well- 
intentioned."  The  part  played  by  the  janitors  is 
particularly  interesting.  The  by-laws  of  governors 
and  prefects  impart  to  janitors  many  rights  and  duties 
which  make  them  regular  assistants  of  the  police. 
They  are  obliged  to  observe  and  to  report  everything 
passing  before  them  which  may  seem  to  them  extraor- 
dinary; they  must  be  particularly  vigilant  about  every 
person  unknown  to  them  who  comes  in  or  goes  out  of 
the  respective  houses ;  they  must  inform  the  police 
about  every  private  gathering  which  seems  to  them 
suspicious;  in  urgent  cases  they  must  detain  sus- 
pected persons  even  before  the  policeman  appears. 
The  practice  goes  still  farther:  sometimes  janitors  are 
formally  invited  to  share  in  the  free  fights  organized 
by  the  police  against  political  demonstration. 

But  from  these  means  of  political  observation  let 
us  pass  over  to  the  ways  in  which  they  are  used.  Here 
also  the  janitors  play  a  not  unimportant  part.  You 
know,  perhaps,  that  every  Russian  citizen  must  pos- 
sess a  testimonial  certifying  his  identity,  and  delivered 
to  him  by  such  social  groups  as  he  belongs  to.  The 
mere  fact  of  not  possessing  such  a  testimonial  or 
"passport"  is  a  crime  that  is  punished  by  deportation 
"on  foot"  to  the  supposed  birthplace  of  the  unfortunate 
person  in  question.  This  order  of  things  originated 
in  the  necessity  of  following  up  and  detecting  in- 
accurate payers  of  the  poll-tax,  which  Peter  the  Great 
introduced  for  the  "taxable  orders"  of  peasants  and 
unprivileged  town  inhabitants.  The  poll-tax  was 
recently  abolished,  but  the  passport  system  thrives  and 
flourishes,  because  it  has  proved  an  invaluable  expedi- 


THE  POLITICAL  TRADITION  195 

ent  for  the  police.  Nobody  is  permitted  to  change  his 
dwelHng-place  without  a  passport ;  and  before  leaving 
it,  even  with  a  passport,  he  must  tell  the  janitor  the 
place  of  his  destination;  and  the  janitor  tells  it  im- 
mediately to  the  police.  Wherever  you  arrive,  you 
must  immediately  show  your  passport  to  the  janitor. 
who  again  informs  the  police.  You  are  not  permitted 
to  pass  the  night,  were  it  with  your  friends  or  relatives, 
without  showing  your  passport  to  the  janitor,  or  your 
host  and  landlord  may  be  punished  by  a  fine  of  as 
much  as  $250. 

Now,  if  you  happen  to  be  under  "surveillance" 
by  the  state  police,  the  police  officer  of  your  dwelling- 
place  communicates  immediately  with  the  local  police 
officer  of  the  place  of  your  arrival,  and  you  are 
sure  to  be  observed  there  in  just  the  same  way.  It 
is  worse  when  you  are  not  permitted  to  go  to  a 
certain  place;  then  your  name  is  found  there  when 
your  passport  is  registered,  and  you  are  sent  away  at 
once.  Or,  should  you  be  under  orders  not  to  leave 
your  dwelling-place  at  all,  your  name  is  separately 
registered,  and  it  is  a  crime  to  have  left  your  abode. 
The  former  state  is  that  of  "secret  surveillance;"  the 
latter,  that  of  an  "open"  or  patent  surveillance,  which 
is  generally  connected  with  "administrative  exile."  It 
legally  deprives  you  of  the  right  of  moving  without 
special  permission:  it  bars  you  at  the  same  time  from 
every  public  activity ;  it  enables  the  police  to  come  into 
your  lodging  and  to  make  domiciliary  search  whenever 
they  like.  Of  course,  this  last  arrogance  cannot  be 
particularly  resented,  because  actually,  though  not 
legally,  such  is  the  general  condition  of  the  Russian 


ig6  RUSSIA  AND  ITS  CRISIS 

citizen.  Writs  of  domiciliary  search  and  of  arrest  very 
often  follow  the  fact,  instead  of  preceding  it,  in  Rus- 
sia. As  regards  arrest  and  imprisonment,  legally  the 
reasons  should  be  explained  within  a  certain  time. 
But  actually  they  may  be  kept  secret  as  long  as  it 
pleases  the  authorities,  the  only  condition  being  that 
they  suppose  you  to  be  so  dangerous  for  the  general 
tranquillity  as  to  deserve  an  administrative  exile. 
Thus  the  only  legal  result  of  your  having  been  im- 
prisoned for  a  prolonged  time,  without  apparent  rea- 
son and  without  any  explanation,  is  the  legal  necessity 
of  sending  you  away — though  you  may  not  have  been 
found  guilty  at  all — just  as  a  justification  for  your 
imprisonment. 

But,  you  may  say,  all  this  is  only  the  fate  of  restless 
people  who  disturb  the  general  tranquillity.  Severe 
as  these  punishments  and  preventive  measures  are, 
they  may  be  very  limited  in  their  action;  they  have 
nothing  to  do  with  the  overwhelming  majority  of  law- 
abiding  citizens,  absorbed  in  their  private  vocations. 
I  may  reply  to  this  that  the  category  of  those  who  are 
not  considered  "well-intentioned"  citizens  is  far  from 
limited,  and  that  this  category  is  rapidly  increasing. 
In  1880  the  number  of  exiled  persons,  under  patent 
police  surveillance,  was  2,873.  I"  ^'^^  spring  of  1901 
about  sixteen  thousand  persons  were  exiled  from 
Petersburg  alone,  and  the  number  of  persons  exiled 
during  two  years  of  M.  Seepyaghin's  ministry  is  said 
to  be  sixty  thousand,  though  I  cannot  certify  this 
figure  to  be  correct.  But  let  us  admit  that  the  group 
of  "ill-intentioned"  persons  is  comparatively  narrow. 
Let  us  put  aside  this  group  of  politically  active  men 


THE  POLITICAL  TRADITION  197 

and  pass  over  to  the  larger  circle  of  the  general  public, 
and  to  the  conditions  of  any  public  activity. 

I  do  not  meaUj  of  course,  public  assemblies  and 
meetings.  The  Russian  people  do  not  possess  the  right 
of  gathering  for  any  public  discussion.  There  being 
no  legal  provisions  for  public  gatherings,  every  crowd 
of  people  on  the  street  or  assembly  of  the  people  in  a 
private  or  public  lodging  is  necessarily  considered 
illegal  and  must  take  the  consequences.  The  by-laws 
published  by  the  governors  under  the  "Statute  of  Pro- 
tection" are  particularly  expressive  on  this  point.  The 
following  by-law,  published  in  1902  by  the  governor 
of  Bessarabia  (where  Kishineff  is  located)  is  typical: 

Forbidden  are  alP  gatherings,  meetings,  and  assemblies  on 
streets,  market-places,  and  other  public  places,  whatever  aim 
they  may  have.  Forbidden  also  for  passers-by  is  any  crowding 
which  impedes  free  circulation,  and  such  gatherings  are  obliged 
to  disperse  at  the  first  request  of  the  police.  All  meetings  in 
private  houses  for  the  aim  of  discussing  the  statutes  of  associa- 
tions for  which  the  permission  of  the  government  is  necessary 
are  permitted  only  with  the  knowledge  and  approval  of  the 
police,  who  have  to  give  permission  for  each  gathering  separately, 
on  an  appointed  day  and  in  an  appointed  place. 

All  gatherings  are  to  be  dispersed  by  armed  force, 
if  they  refuse  to  obey  the  "first  request,"  and  particular 
(secret)  instructions  to  army  officers  make  them  an- 
swerable for  any  delay  of  action,  "even  should  it  be 
caused  by  feelings  of  humanity."  This  may  explain 
wdiy  mere  crowding  in  the  streets  is  considered  both 
by  the  government  and  the  revolutionists  as  a  means 

^■'  Exception  was  time  and  again  actually  made  by  the  police  of 
anti-Semitic  gatherings,  intended  to  teach  Jewish  socialists,  by  way 
of  massacres,  to  be  more  "  well-intentioned "  toward  the  existing 
order  of  things. 


198  RUSSIA  AND  ITS  CRISIS 

of  revolutionary  action.  yVn  entirely  peaceful  discus- 
sion of  workingmen  about  their  strike  recently  served 
as  the  signal  for  a  formal  attack  of  the  Cossacks  near 
Rostov  on  the  Don. 

But  even  under  normal  conditions  simple  gather- 
ings in  private  lodgings  are  closely  observed  and  at 
any  time  may  be  proclaimed  illegal.  If  you  gather 
together  a  dozen  or  two  of  your  friends,  you  must 
make  it  known  to  the  police.  If  they  are  students, 
you  had  better  not  do  it  at  all,  even  if  you  are  a  pro- 
fessor and  the  students  are  your  pupils  in  the  univer- 
sity. The  professors  of  the  Petersburg  university, 
who  are  not  at  all  radical,  recently  claimed  as  a  spe- 
cial right  "that  it  might  be  made  safe  for  every  pro- 
fessor, on  his  own  responsibility,  to  gather  students 
together,  either  in  the  university  buildings,  with  the 
permission  of  the  rector,  or  in  their  own  homes,  with- 
out asking  a  special  permission  of  the  police  and  with- 
out incurring  prosecution  for  the  simple  fact  of  having 
convoked  or  admitted  such  gatherings,  in  order  to 
explain  to  the  students  questions  touching  their  own 
specialty." 

Of  course,  the  government  cannot  forbid  every 
public  conference.  But  it  takes  care  that  no  free  word 
shall  be  heard  from  a  public  chair.  No  public  lecture 
can  be  delivered  unless  it  is  specially  permitted.  To 
get  a  permission  is  not  easy.  Even  such  lecturers  as 
occupy  official  chairs,  or  are  highly  placed  in  govern- 
ment service,  are  not  sure  to  be  allowed  to  lecture, 
especially  in  the  provinces.  Such  a  permission  de- 
pending on  the  high  representatives  of  the  Ministries 
of  Public  Instruction  and  of  the  Interior,  namely  the 


THE  POLITICAL  TRADITION  199 

local  "curator"  and  "governor,"  the  same  lecture  may 
be  allowed  in  one  province  and  forbidden  in  another. 
P"or  the  most  part,  not  only  the  subject  of  a  lecture 
must  be  made  known  previously  to  the  authorities, 
but  also  a  syllabus,  and  often  even  the  very  text  of  it, 
must  be  drawn  up.  the  red  tape  is  affixed  to  the  manu- 
script, and  the  lecturer  is  not  afterward  permitted  to 
add  one  word  to  the  permitted  text.  Sometimes  a 
representative  of  the  local  authorities  is  present  at  the 
lecture  with  a  copy  of  the  allowed  text,  in  order  to  be 
sure  that  no  free  word  is  pronounced.  Yet  all  this 
does  not  free  the  lecturer  from  responsibility,  if  his 
delivery  should  chance  to  produce  such  a  deep  impres- 
sion on  his  audience  as  is  likely  to  displease  the  au-. 
thorities  and  be  classified  under  the  head  of  "disturbing 
public  tranquillity."  Quite  recently  an  old  and  very 
respectable  journalist,  immediately  after  a  lecture 
which  he  had  delivered  in  Siberia,  was  carried  off  to 
a  political  prison  in  Petersburg,  merely  because  his 
audience  behaved  too  tumultously  under  the  impres- 
sion of  his  delivery. 

Now,  all  these  difficulties  and  measures  of  pre- 
caution become  infinitely  greater  if  the  lecture  is  to  be 
delivered  to  plain  peasant  folk  or  workingmen.  Such 
lectures  were  not  delivered  in  Russia  before  1872-74, 
and  then  they  were  allowed  only  in  Petersburg  and 
Moscow,  where  two  "standing  committees"  w^ere  au- 
thorized to  organize  them.  Yet  these  lectures  were 
not  to  be  delivered  extemporaneously:  they  were  to  be 
read  out  of  printed  leaflets,  compiled  by  the  most  con- 
servative contributors  of  the  Petersburg  committee. 
Until    1891    this  committee  had   published   only    140 


200  RUSSIA  AND  ITS  CRISIS 

leaflets;  but  a  third  of  them  were  absolutely  unfit  to 
be  read  before  the  people,  and  the  remainder  consisted 
mostly  of  the  lives  of  saints,  histories  of  churches  and 
monasteries,  and  so  forth.  No  Russian  classics  were 
comprised  among  them.  This  was  the  material  which 
was  to  be  proffered  to  the  popular  audiences  of  the 
provincial  cities  of  Russia,  according  to  the  regula- 
tions of  1876.  Still,  thousands  of  hearers  crowded 
before  the  doors  of  narrow  and  scantily  furnished 
rooms,  longing  for  admittance;  they  gladly  paid  some 
kopecks'  entrance  fee,  patiently  listened  to  the  dry  ex- 
position, and  did  not  tire  of  returning  until  they  knew 
so  well  the  few  pamphlets  which  they  liked  as  to  be 
able  to  repeat  them  aloud  in  advance  of  the  lecturer. 
Nearly  every  attempt  to  increase  the  number  of  the 
officially  permitted  pamphlets  was  an  absolute  failure. 
Thus,  for  instance,  in  the  year  1892,  when  the  cholera 
was  approaching,  a  person  intrusted  with  an  office  by 
the  governor  of  Riga  asked  in  vain  for  permission  to 
read  before  a  popular  audience  an  article  on  "con- 
tagion." I  must  mention  that  this  article  had  already 
been  published  in  a  newspaper  edited  by  the  govern- 
ment itself  for  the  people,  a  newspaper  to  which  every 
village  board  of  administration  is  obliged  to  subscribe. 
As  regards  district  towns  and  villages,  no  public 
lectures  were  permitted  to  be  delivered  there  until 
1894.  How  dangerous  this  departure  seemed  to  the 
government  may  be  judged  by  the  obstacles  which 
were  put  in  its  way.  In  order  that  a  village  philan- 
thropist might  read  to  the  people  some  poor  pages  of 
printed  matter  about  the  Holy  Land  or  Columbus's 
discoverv,    three   ministers   had   first   to  consult — the 


THE  POLITICAL  TRADITION  201 

Ministers  of  Instruction,  of  the  Interior,  and  of  the 
Holy  Synod.  It  was  only  in  1901  that  the  village  and 
district  lectures  were  put  on  the  same  basis  as  pro- 
vincial ones ;  /.  'e.,  they  were  left  to  depend  on  the  local 
representatives  of  the  Ministries  of  the  Interior  and 
of  Instruction.  In  the  same  year  the  latter  ministry 
yielded  in  a  certain  degree  to  the  numberless  demands 
of  provincial  councils  and  local  societies  for  the  en- 
lightenment of  the  people;  permission  was  given  to 
read  before  the  people,  besides  the  scanty  number  of 
pamphlets  specially  permitted  for  such  popular  read- 
ings, also  such  as  were  allowed  by  the  ministry  to  be 
introduced  into  the  libraries  of  the  pupils  of  primary 
schools.  Then  it  was  permitted  not  only  to  read  the 
books,  but  to  "transmit  their  contents  orally,  while  not 
transgressing  its  limits."  You  must  know  that  all  the 
lecturers  in  their  turn  have  to  be  formally  allowed 
by  the  governor  to  read  the  printed  matter ;  they  are 
invariably  refused  permission  if  they  are  not  supposed 
to  be  quite  "well-intentioned."  I  know  cases  where 
only  three  out  of  eight  persons  proposed  were  found 
reliable  enough  to  read  or  to  expound  the  printed  text. 
Of  course,  the  general  reading  of  the  people  also 
is  under  close  observation.  There  are  not  many  free 
public  libraries  in  Russia.  There  were  only  forty-nine 
in  1856,  i.  e.,  before  the  great  revival  of  Russian 
public  opinion  during  the  reforms  of  Alexander  II. 
At  the  beginning  of  the  actual  reign  of  Nicholas  II. 
(1894)  tiiey  numbered  862,  but  only  ninety-six  of  this 
number  were  outside  the  cities.  The  real  growth  of 
village  libraries  has  begun  since  that  time,  owing  to 
the  philanthropic  exertions  of  provincial  councils  and 


202  RUSSIA  AND  ITS  CRISIS 

local  societies  for  culture.  This  movement  was  closely 
followed  by  restrictive  measures  of  the  government. 
Here  also  the  free  libraries  for  the  use  of  the  upper 
class  are  treated  differently  from  those  for  the  lower 
classes.  For  the  former  the  government  is  satisfied 
to  prescribe  what  ought  not  to  be  read.  For  the  latter 
it  goes  farther  in  its  tutelage  and  decides  what  ought 
to  be  read.  Thus  we  have  two  official  catalogues  for 
reading :  that  of  books  prohibited  for  general  libra- 
ries, and  that  of  books  permitted  for  the  people's 
libraries. 

Which,  then,  are  the  books  forbidden  in  the  public 
libraries  of  the  educated?  They  are  about  two  hun- 
dred, and  these  books  are  published  in  Russia,  with 
the  permission  of  the  censor,  and  are  sold  freely  in  the 
bookshops.  Books  which  are  altogether  forbidden 
even  for  private  use  are  not  included  in  this  number. 
Among  the  books  prohibited  in  the  public  libraries 
you  may  find  Russian  translations  of  Bagehot's  Physics 
and  Politics,  Huxley's  Evidence  as  to  Man's  Place  in 
Nature,  Lyell's  Geological  Evidence  of  the  Antiquity 
of  Man,  Mill's  Political  Economy,  all  Spencer's  works. 
Green's  History  of  the  English  People,  Bryce's  Amer- 
ican Commonwealth,  Fyffe's  History  of  Europe. 
From  these  you  may  judge  of  the  rest. 

The  other  catalogue,  that  of  books  permitted  in  the 
people's  libraries,  would  not  strike  a  foreign  observer  in 
the  same  way ;  but  to  a  Russian  it  is  simply  crushing. 
The  "Learned  Committee  of  the  Ministry  of  Public 
Instruction"  undertook  to  make  a  choice  for  this  pur- 
pose among  all  Russian  books  actually  on  sale.  They 
are  about  ninety  thousand,  and  the  ministerial  cata- 


THE  POLITICAL  TRADITION  J03 

logue  allows  the  Russian  people  to  read  from  two 
thousand  five  hundred  to  three  thousand  of  them;  /.  r., 
about  ^.7,  per  cent,  of  the  whole  number.  And,  indeed, 
the  committee  is  unable  to  avoid  this  :  how  can  it  itself 
have  read  all  Russian  books  ?  Since  the  catalogue  was 
published  in  1896  seventy-five  thousand  more  Rus- 
sian books  have  been  printed ;  but  only  8  per  cent,  of 
these  are  admitted  to  the  people's  and  the  young 
people's  libraries.  Which,  now,  are  these  selected  spe- 
cimens of  Russian  literature?  The  provincial  council 
of  Koorsk  designated  not  less  than  sixty  of  the  most 
prominent  Russian  authors  whose  works  were  entirely 
left  out  of  the  catalogue.  Among  the  writers  of  fic- 
tion, such  as  Saltykov,  Korolenko,  Garshin,  Gleb 
Oospensky,  Chehov;  among  our  poets,  such  as 
Nekrasov,  Nadson;  among  the  critics,  Belinsky, 
Dobrolubov,  Shelgoonov.  Michailovsky ;  among  the 
historians,  Kostomarov — are  not  mentioned  in  the 
catalogue.  Our  best  periodicals,  beginning  with  the 
Contemporary  of  1856-66,  and  including  Fatherland 
Memorials,  Russian  Thought,  are  also  forbidden.  On 
the  other  hand,  the  catalogue  is  filled  up  by  such 
special  works  as  can  interest  only  a  scholar,  not  an 
ordinary  reader.  Among  the  periodicals  and  news- 
papers which  are  admitted  special  ones  largely  prevail. 
You  may  find  there  plenty  of  material  about  the  rais- 
ing of  bees  and  birds,  cattle  and  horses:  but  for  p-en- 
eral  information  you  have  only  the  nationalistic  news- 
papers, Nezv  Times  (Novoya  Vraimya) ,  Light  (Svyet), 
and  tlie  Moscoiv  Nc-lVS.  Anything  that  may  draw 
attention  to  the  liberal  current  of  public  opinion  is  for- 
bidden entrance  into  the  precincts  of  popular  libraries. 


204  RUSSIA  AND  ITS  CRISIS 

Yet,  you  may  say,  all  this  is  permitted  to  pass 
freely  through  the  printing  press  and  to  be  bought  in 
the  shops!  And  this  brings  us  to  the  Russian  censor- 
ship. Here  also  we  may  distinguish  the  period  of 
paternal  tutelage  and  the  period  of  arbitrary  rule  legal- 
ized by  statutes.  During  the  first  period,  the  censor 
was  obliged  to  look  after  the  transgressions  of  law 
and  of  morals,  as  well  as  of  good  patriarchal  habits 
and  even  of  Russian  grammar  on  the  part  of  the  press. 
This  was  the  time  when  a  censor  could  be  arrested  for 
not  having  prohibited  a  too  ardent  poem,  "To  a 
Beauty,"  and  Emperor  Nicholas  I.,  as  a  particular 
kindness,  himself  revised  our  greatest  poet  Pooshkin, 
through  the  intermediacy  oi  the  "Third  Section." 
This  period  ended  with  the  reign  of  Nicholas  I.  in 

1855- 

The   new   era   began    with   the   statute   of    1865, 

which  was  nothing  less  than  an  adaptation  of  Napo- 
leon III.'s  law  concerning  the  press,  compiled  by  Per- 
signy  in  1852.  But  for  the  Russian  government  it 
seemed  the  very  incarnation  of  liberalism  :  the  govern- 
ment soon  repented  of  having  given  the  press  so  much 
liberty,  and  fundamentally  changed  the  statute  of  1865 
by  the  subsequent  measures  of  1872  and  1882.  The 
statute  of  1865  had  liberated  periodicals  and  books  of 
more  than  ten  sheets  from  the  censure  of  a  book  before 
printing,  the  former  "previous  censure."  By  this  stat- 
ute, the  authors  had  had  to  answer  for  their  trespasses 
only  before  the  regular  court. 

But  as  judges  and  attorneys  persisted  in  their  wish 
to  be  independent  and  refused  to  find  any  crime  in 
books  that  censors  handed  over  to  them,  it  was  found 


THE  POLITICAL  TRADITION  205 

more  convenient  to  seize  printed  books  before  their 
issue.  The  pubHshers  are  now  obliged  to  keep  printed 
books  a  week,  and  the  monthhes  four  days,  before 
pubHcation,  in  order  to  give  time  to  the  censor  to 
make  himself  acquainted  with  the  book  and  to  stop 
pubHcation  if  he  wants  to.  If  the  offense  is  of  httle 
importance,  the  pubHsher  can  transact  his  case  pri- 
vately with  the  censor,  by  sacrificing  some  lines  of 
pages  that  were  incriminated.  But  if  the  trespass 
seems  to  the  authorities  grave,  the  book  is  given  over 
to  a  committee  of  ministers,  instead  of  to  a  court 
of  justice,  as  the  statute  of  1865  provided;  the  peri- 
odical is  to  be  judged  by  a  special  committee  of  four 
ministers,  instead  of  by  a  committee  of  the  senate — 
i.  e.,  the  Russian  Supreme  Court  —  as  was  the  regu- 
lation of  the  statute  of  1865.  When  this  extreme 
measure  is  resorted  to,  it  generally  ends  in  the  destruc- 
tion of  a  book  and  the  stopping  of  a  periodical.  The 
legislation  concerning  the  periodical  press  is  particu- 
larly rich  in  every  kind  of  preventive,  coercive,  and 
repressive  measure.  First,  the  government  has  its 
hand  in  starting  periodicals,  as  no  paper  can  be  edited 
unless  the  editor  is  officially  approved  by  the  censor  as 
a  "  well-intentioned  "  person.  Sometimes  long  years 
pass  before  any  independent  organ  is  permitted  to  be 
published.  But  if,  owing  to  some  lack  of  information 
or  by  other  slip,  an  independent  journalist  is  permitted 
to  enter  the  field,  there  are  plenty  of  means  in  reserve 
to  keep  him  quiet.  The  whole  finely  graduated  scale  of 
coercive  measures  can  be  consecutively  applied  against 
his  paper :  three  consecutive  warnings  are  followed  by 
the  stopping  of  a  periodical,  after  which  it  is  given  up  to 


2o6  RUSSIA  AND  ITS  CRISIS 

"previous  censure;"  besides  this,  the  right  of  printing 
advertisements  may  be  reserved,  or  the  retail  sale  of 
copies  forbidden.  How  often  these  measures  were 
taken  may  be  seen  from  their  number,  which  amounts 
to  581  during  a  period  of  forty  years;  i.  e.,  more  than 
one  per  month.  But  this  can  give  you  little  idea  of 
how  constant  was  the  struggle,  and  how  many  of  the 
best  and  most  influential  periodicals  succumbed  in  it. 
Yet  this  is  not  enough.  There  exists  another  set  of 
measures  used  by  the  government,  which  serves  it 
better  than  all  these  punishments  of  the  press  crimes. 
The  best  means  was  thought  to  be  not  to  let  the  press 
sin  at  all,  by  withholding  from  public  discussion  most 
important  questions  just  at  the  time  when  their  dis- 
cussion was  most  needed.  Such  a  right  was  formally 
given  to  the  Minister  of  the  Interior  as  early  as  1873. 
This  is  why  it  is  quite  impossible  for  the  Russian  press 
to  fulfil  its  aim,  by  discussing  subjects  which  most 
attract  the  public  attention.  The  use  made  of  these 
prohibitive  measures  was  as  large  as  may  be  imagined. 
If  cholera  approaches  the  Russian  borders,  the  press 
is  ordered  not  to  say  a  word  about  it.  If  a  financial 
reform  is  prepared,  or  a  commercial  treaty  concluded, 
or  gold  coinage  introduced,  however  important  it  may 
be  for  everybody,  the  Russian  press  is  forbidden  to 
discuss  the  matter,  in  order  that  public  credit  may  not 
be  shaken.  Even  if  a  bank  is  on  the  point  of  becom- 
ing insolvent,  the  press  has  no  right  to  disturb  readers 
by  any  rumors  to  that  effect.  The  "public  tranquil- 
lity" seems  to  the  government  to  be  such  a  valuable 
thing  that  it  is  not  allowed  to  be  troubled  even  by 
signs   of  people's   sympathy   with   the   Tsar.      When 


THE  POLITICAL  TRADITION  207 

Alexander  III.  was  on  his  death-bed.  newspapers  were 
not  permitted  to  speak  of  his  ilhiess.  But,  of  course, 
the  chief  use  that  is  made  of  this  right  of  the  Ministry 
of  the  Interior  is  that  of  preventing  pohtical  gossip. 
No  communication  concerning  pohtical  processes  or 
criminals  is  permitted.  No  information  about  the 
state  of  peasants  and  about  their  relation  to  landed 
proprietors  is  to  be  published.  When  a  movement 
among  workingmen  began,  during  the  present  reign, 
this  subject  also  was  withheld  from  public  discussion. 
Again,  the  disturbances  among  the  students  must  be 
passed  over  in  silence  by  the  press.  Religious  disturb- 
ances and  religious  persecutions  very  often  also  must 
pass  unnoticed  by  Russian  readers.  In  short,  there  is 
no  burning  question  of  the  times  that  is  accessible 
to  the  Russian  press.  The  chronicle  of  the  national 
life  in  the  Russian  monthlies  often  consists  only  in 
reprints  of  official  edicts  or  communications,  while 
forbearing  every  criticism  thereupon.  Nothing  is  per- 
mitted to  be  known  about  all  these  things,  but  what  is 
told  to  Russian  readers  in  official  communications  by 
the  go\Trnment,  reprinted  by  the  press  from  the 
Government's  Advertiser.  But  sometimes  even  such 
reprinting  is  found  dangerous,  and  newspapers  are 
ordered  not  to  publish  the  official  communications  of 
the  Government's  Advertiser.  ]\Ioreo\'er,  not  satisfied 
to  withhold  from  public  knowledge  and  discussion 
matters  of  general  interest,  the  censorship  uses  its 
power  to  protect  private  persons  from  public  criti- 
cism, if  only  they  are  mighty  enough  to  claim  its 
protection.  For  instance,  the  editors  were  asked  not 
to   speak  about   the   family  affairs  of  a   certain   Mr. 


2o8  RUSSIA  AND  ITS  CRISIS 

Markus,  a  privy  councilor;  to  keep  silence  about  the 
attempt  at  suicide  of  a  young  aristocrat,  Nicholas 
Mooravyov;  to  forbear  mentioning  the  duel  between 
two  officers  of  high  society,  a  quarrel  between  two 
high  officials,  even  not  to  print  the  articles  of  one  high 
official  against  another,  etc.  Very  often  scandals  in 
high  society  are  known  to  the  editorial  staff  only  by 
way  of  such  orders  of  the  censor.  How  customary  this 
role  of  censors  as  protectors  of  private  interests  has 
finally  become,  you  may  judge  by  the  fact  that  some- 
times the  censor  does  not  even  give  himself  the  trouble 
of  concealing  private  motives  for  his  orders.  Lately, 
an  order  was  issued  not  to  publish  anything  about  some 
scandalous  facts  concerning  "doping"  horses  by  influ- 
ential sportsmen,  on  the  ground  that  "  this  would  not 
please  Grand  Duke  Demetrius  Konstantinovich." 

But  the  censorship  tries  to  go  still  farther.  It  is 
not  sufficient  for  it  to  influence  the  press  in  a  negative 
way,  that  of  imposing  silence.  It  is  also  interested  in 
influencing  it  in  a  positive  sense,  that  of  making  the 
press  tell  what  the  authorities  want  told.  In  the  ear- 
lier, the  patriarchial,  period  of  its  existence  the  press 
was  supposed  to  serve  "the  views  of  the  government" 
by  its  own  initiative.  When  this  supposition  was 
found  not  to  square  with  actuality,  the  censor  began 
trying  to  induce  the  press  to  "serve  the  views  of  the 
government"  by  way  of  persuasion  and  personal  in- 
fluence. 

The  minister  of  public  instruction,  Goloveen,  in 
1862  made  an  avowal  before  the  Committee  of  Min- 
isters, that  all  measures  of  rigor  which  had  been  taken 
heretofore  against  the  press  availed  nothing ;  that  they 


THE  POLITICAL  TRADITION  209 

only  "embittered  the  writers,  helped  them  to  form  a 
conventional  language  tacitly  agreed  upon  and  well 
understood  by  the  readers,  and  finally  produced  a  gen- 
eral contempt  for  a  government  which  was  unable  to 
attain  its  aim."  Mr.  Goloveen  recognized  that  the 
government  ought  not  to  have  tried  to  transform 
literature  into  an  official  institution  ;  literature,  he  said, 
was  the  expression  of  the  thoughts  and  wishes  of 
educated  society;  the  government  must  know  these 
wishes,  but  the  censorship  only  helps  to  conceal  them 
from  the  government,  without  being  able  to  change 
them.  Yet,  Mr.  Goloveen  thought,  the  government 
could  indirectly  influence  journalists  by  letting  them 
know  the  views  of  the  government  and  subsidizing 
them.  In  the  year  1858  it  was  even  proposed  to  the 
Committee  of  Ministers  to  form  a  particular  com- 
mittee for  influencing  public  opinion.  Now  it  was 
quite  clear  that  the  best  and  most  influential  journalists 
were  not  to  be  corrupted  in  this  way.  Hence  the  gov- 
ernment was  obliged  to  start  an  organ  of  its  own,  in 
order  publicly  to  defend  the  measures  of  the  govern- 
ment and  so  to  influence  public  opinion.  Such  an 
organ  was  the  Northern  Post,  established  in  1862  by 
the  minister  Valooyev.  The  same  question  arose  in  a 
committee  in  1879;  the  minister  Valooyev  proposed 
again  to  found  a  particular  newspaper  which  should 
be  under  the  direction  of  the  government.  And  indeed 
in  the  following  year  (1880),  such  an  official  organ, 
called  The  Shore,  was  started.  It  was  edited  by  Pro- 
fessor Tseetovich,  who  made  himself  a  name  by 
venomous  invectives  against  Russian  radicalism.  The 
Shore  succumbed  before  the  end  of  the  same  year,  a 


210  RUSSIA  AND  ITS  CRISIS 

victim  of  public  indifference,  though  materially  it  was 
well  supported  by  the  government,  receiving  about 
$65,000.  This  was  also  the  fate  of  other  enterprises 
of  the  same  kind,  except  such  as  received  the  right  of 
publishing  official  advertisements,  for  which  big  sums 
of  money  were  paid  —  the  Moscow  News,  for  instance. 

Finally,  one  of  the  chief  directors  of  the  press  de- 
partment, Mr.  Solovyov  (1896-1900)  recurred  to  a 
simpler  means  of  influencing  newspapers.  He  proposed 
to  some  of  them,  that  were  running  the  risk  of  being 
stopped,  the  alternative  of  appointing  official  editors, 
who  were  to  be  liberally  paid  and  were  to  warrant  the 
good  behavior  of  their  papers.  This  resource  was  also 
a  failure.  Some  periodicals  refused  to  comply  with 
the  suggestion,  and  were  stopped ;  others  that  accepted 
tried  to  satisfy  their  official  heads  with  money  and  to 
withhold  from  them  the  actual  business.  We  cannot 
leave  this  subject  without  mentioning  a  most  ingenious 
trick  of  the  Minister  of  the  Interior.  In  the  years  1897 
and  1899  two  socialistic  monthlies  were  published  at  a 
time  when  no  liberal  organs  were  allowed  to  be  started. 
The  riddle  was  explained  soon :  there  was  a  spy  in  the 
editorial  staff  of  both  periodicals,  and  he  had  helped 
to  start  them,  in  order  to  observe  the  socialistic  circles. 
Of  course,  neither  existed  more  than  a  year. 

All  these  measures  against  the  press  having  been 
constantly  in  use  since  the  time  when  the  press  had 
become  a  social  necessity  in  Russia,  you  may  easily 
guess  how  distorted  must  have  been  the  reflection  of 
contemporary  public  opinion  which  the  Russian  press 
was  giving.  Of  course,  public  opinion  sought  a 
remedy,  and  found  it  in  the  clandestine  press  written  or 


THE  POLITICAL  TRADITION  211 

published  abroad  and  smuggled  into  Russia  in  increas- 
ing numbers  of  copies.  Through  not  suffering  any 
legal  opposition,  the  government  thus  helped  to  elimi- 
nate moderate  dements  from  public  life.  Maimed  pub- 
lic opinion  took  its  revenge  by  growing  more  and  more 
radical.  But  later  we  shall  return  to  this  question  of 
what  influence  the  policy  of  self-preservation  of  autoc- 
racy had  on  the  development  of  public  opinion  in  Rus- 
sia. Here  it  was  only  necessary  to  mention  that  the 
stifling  of  open  criticism  and  opposition  was  by  no 
means  the  only  consequence  of  the  governmental  policy. 

Now  we  come  over  to  another  branch  of  public 
life,  where  the  political  influence  of  the  government 
could  make  itself  still  more  easily  felt.  This  is  the 
department  of  the  public  schools.  I  do  not  mention 
the  private  schools,  because  they  are  quite  insignificant 
in  Russia.  They  played  a  much  larger  part  in  the 
popular  instruction  of  a  century  or  half  a  century  ago ; 
but  since  then  they  have  been  entirely  pushed  into  the 
background  by  the  government  schools.  These  schools 
now  almost  exclusively  possess  the  right  of  giving 
such  diplomas  to  their  pupils  as  entitle  them  to  enter 
the  ofiicial  service,  and  to  enter  higher  institutions  of 
learning.  By  this  alone  the  official  schools  contrived 
to  monopolize  public  instruction. 

A  less  official  character  is  preserved  as  yet  by  the 
elementary  schools  for  the  village  population.  This 
is  explained  by  the  origin  of  these  schools.  The  gov- 
ernment was  not  very  favorable  to  such  schemes  for 
the  enlightening  of  the  common  people  as  have  been 
formed  since  the  end  of  the  eighteenth  century  by  the 
philanthropists  of  the  educated   class.      Thus   it   did 


212  RUSSIA  AND  ITS  CRISIS 

almost    nothing    for    the    instruction    of    the    people 
until  the  epoch  of  the  emancipation  of  the  peasants 
in   1 86 1.      Then  the  activity  of  the   newly   founded 
provincial  councils,  the  Zemstvos,  began,  and  the  peas- 
ant  schools  were  first  started  by  the  Russian   local 
self-government.     In  correspondence  with  this  origin, 
the  teaching  staff  of  the  village  schools  were  accus- 
tomed  to   consider  their   work   as   a   kind   of   social 
duty  which  was  to  be  performed,  not  as  a  means  of 
livelihood  or  as  a  technical  profession,  but  as  a  high 
vocation,  chosen  by  their  own  initiative,  for  the  good 
of  the  country.     But  this  patriotic  enthusiasm  drew 
the    distrust    of    the    government    upon    the    village 
teachers  and  upon  the  whole  enterprise  of  the  pro- 
vincial   councils.      During    the    first    few    years,    the 
development  of  this  type  of  village  school  remained 
unheeded  by  the  government;    but  when  it  assumed 
considerable  dimensions,  the  government  became  jeal- 
ous of  it  and  took  measures  to  fetter  the  initiative  of 
the  local  self-government.     The  control  of  directors 
and  government  inspectors  of  local  school  boards  was 
increased;   the  rights  of  the  delegates  of  self-govern- 
ment were  diminished.     The  aim  of  the  government 
was  to  let  the  county  councils  pay  the  money,  and  to 
take  all  the  rest  of  the  business  into  its  own  hands. 
Thus  far  it  has  not  succeeded,  but  the  school  programs, 
the  appointment  of  teachers,  the  choice  of  text-books, 
the  examinations — all  that  is  already  under  the  con- 
trol of  ministerial  officials. 

Not  satisfied  with  this,  and  powerless  to  open 
its  own  type  of  village  schools,  the  government  began 
to    encourage    a    competing    initiative    of    the    Holy 


THE  POLITICAL  TRADITION  213 

Synod.  There  was  no  regular  parish  school  in  an- 
cient Russia,  and  our  clergy,  as  we  know  already, 
was  too  little  educated  itself  to  take  care  of  the 
education  of  the  people.  They  were  not  in  the  least 
interested  in  any  action  taken  for  popular  enlighten- 
ment. Such  clerical  tendencies  as  distinguish  the 
church  schools  in  western  Europe  never  existed  in 
Russia.  Now,  the  government  itself,  which  in  Europe 
tries  to  withdraw  the  school  from  church  influence, 
has  in  Russia  recently  tried  to  awaken  the  zeal  of 
the  clergy,  in  order  to  oppose  it  to  the  "politically 
dangerous"  initiative  of  the  provincial  councils.  A 
type  of  parish  school  was  started  opposed  to  that  of 
the  self-government  school.  Instead  of  the  real  knowl- 
edge which  the  teachers  were  trying  to  impart  in 
the  latter,  the  parish  school  was  concerned  chiefly 
with  singing  religious  hymns  and  reading  mediaeval 
Slavic  —  a  dead  and  artificial  language,  in  which  the 
Russian  service  books  are  written.  But  as  long  as 
only  the  parish  priests  and  the  sextons  were  supposed 
to  teach  in  the  parish  schools,  these  schools  existed 
only  on  paper  and  in  the  official  reports  of  the  Holy 
Synod.  Exertions  were  then  made  to  compel  the  pro- 
vincial councils  to  turn  their  pecuniary  help  into  the 
clerical  channel.  A  formal  struggle  for  existence 
began  between  the  two  types  of  village  schools.  Lastly, 
Mr.  Pobedonostsev  managed  to  find  money  for  the 
support  of  the  parish  schools  in  the  state  exchequer. 
But  moral  victory  was  on  the  side  of  the  provincial 
councils'  schools,  as  is  to  be  seen  from  the  circumstance 
that  the  clerical  school  is  now  about  to  adopt  their 
program  and  to  prepare  special  teachers,  in  order  to  be 
able  to  compete  with  its  secular  rival. 


214  RUSSIA  AND  ITS  CRISIS 

Unhappily  both  systems,  even  taken  together,  are 
not  equal  to  the  rapidly  increasing  demand  for  ele- 
mentary education.     Of  course,  the  number  of  young 
men  that  have  passed  through  the  school  increases  at 
a  very  rapid  rate.     Out  of  every  hundred  of  the  con- 
scripts,  for  instance,  there  were  ninety-live  illiterate 
men  in   1868;    seventy-nine  in   1875;    and  not  more 
than  fifty-five  in   1898.     But  all  exertions  of  philan- 
thropy and  of  clerical  policy  are  not  enough  to  keep 
pace  with  the  natural  increase  of  population.     For  this 
increasing  number  alone  it  would  be  necessary  to  open 
2,606  new  schools  every  year;   and  there  are  not  more 
than  one  thousand  and  seven  hundred  opened  annually. 
There   are   about   thirty   thousand   provincial    council 
schools,  and  about  eighteen  thousand  parish  schools, 
while  not  less  than  three  times  as  many  (one  hundred 
and  fifty  thousand)   new  schools  must  be  opened  in 
order  that  all  young  people  of  an  age  requiring  educa- 
tion may   receive  elementary  instruction.     We   must 
add  that   such  instruction  as   is  generally  given  by 
elementary  schools 'does  not  go  far  beyond  simple  read- 
ing, writing,  and  counting.     Every  attempt  to  increase 
the  number  of  years  of  study  (from  three  to  four  or 
five),  and  still  more  any  attempt  to  enlarge  the  pro- 
gram and  to  impart  some  knowledge  of  geography  and 
history,  invariably  meets  with  obstacles  from  the  side 
of  the  authorities. 

But  to  consider  the  next  step  in  the  system  of 
public  education  —  the  secondary  and  high  schools.  In 
Russia  these  institutions  antedate  the  village  schools. 
Schools  were  necessary,  if  only  that  the  government 
might  have  educated  officials;    they   were   necessary 


THE  POLITICAL  TRADITION  215 

also  as  a  preparation  for  the  higher  institutes  of  learn- 
ing. And  so  they  were  started  by  the  government  as 
early  as  the  reign  of  Peter  the  Great;  and  since 
Catherine  II.  the  system  of  government  secondary 
education  may  be  considered  as  being  firmly  established 
in  Russia.  The  government  continued  to  favor  sec- 
ondary education  until  the  first  half-century  of  their 
continuous  existence  ( 1786- 1828).  During  this  period 
the  secondary  schools,  while  serving  the  aims  of  the 
government,  were  not  much  frequented  for  the  ideal 
purposes  of  education. 

But  then  the  position  entirely  changed.  Private 
education,  as  prosecuted  by  the  government,  was 
less  and  less  resorted  to.  As  a  consequence  of  the 
general  spread  of  culture  in  Russia,  the  public  schools 
were  filled  with  young  people  who  studied  for  rea- 
sons other  than  a  diploma  and  the  chance  of  official 
service.  At  once  the  government  became  suspicious 
and  began  to  find  that  young  people  were  over- 
educated.  It  wished  the  children  of  the  higher  classes 
to  be  prepared  for  service,  civil  and  military;  and, 
as  regards  the  children  of  the  lower  classes,  it 
wished  them  to  have  a  professional  education  in 
schools  of  a  lower  type.  Both  wishes,  in  spite  of 
a  whole  series  of  prohibitive  measures,  it  was  un- 
able to  realize.  Particularly  since  the  middle  of  the 
nineteenth  century  young  men  longing  for  general 
education  have  become  more  and  more  averse  to  state 
service  and  to  technical  craft.  Presently  they  became 
absorbed  by  the  growing  political  movement.  Then 
the  secondary  schools  were  transformed  into  an  insti- 
tution of  the  police  as  the  best  means  of  preventing 


2i6  RUSSIA  AND  ITS  CRISIS 

the  spread  of  political  ideas  in  the  younger  generations. 
A  particular  system  of  teaching  was  started  which  ex- 
alted the  formal  side  of  education  above  the  real,  and 
which  tried  to  occupy  the  student's  mind  with  objects 
removed  as  far  as  was  possible  from  the  living  present. 
This  was  the  "classical  system"  of  the  minister  Deme- 
trius Tolstoy. 

By  and  by  the  system  of  political  observation 
increased  enormously  under  the  school  regime  of 
Tolstoy.  Pupils  were  allowed  to  read  only  such 
books  as  had  passed  the  censorship  of  school  authori- 
ties. I  know  of  cases  where  lads  were  excluded  from 
the  school  for  having  dared  to  look  into  the  works 
of  our  best  literary  critic,  Belinsky,  or  for  having  come 
to  a  public  library  to  take  a  book  for  their  relatives. 
For  the  student  to  be  present  at  a  meeting  of  a  learned 
society,  or  to  visit  the  theater,  a  permission  of  the 
headmaster  was  required.  Neither  was  this  system  of 
close  observation  restricted  to  the  college  walls;  it 
followed  the  pupil  into  the  street,  and  even  to  his  own 
home.  Special  teachers  were  entitled  to  visit  the  lodg- 
ings of  the  pupil  at  any  time.  When  a  pupil  had  fin- 
ished his  course  of  study,  a  moral  and  political  "de- 
scription" of  him  was  to  be  drawn  by  a  teacher,  which 
followed  him  to  a  higher  institution  of  learning.  Thus 
no  "ill-intentioned"  pupil  was  likely  to  pass  out  of  the 
secondary  school. 

How  severe  was  this  process  of  selection  may 
be  seen  in  the  following  statistics :  In  the  years 
1872-90  only  4-9  per  cent,  finished  this  classical 
school  in  the  proper  time  (f.  e.,  eight  years)  ;  of  the 
others,  21-37  P^^  c^^'^^-  finished  it  with  difficulty;   but 


THE  POLITICAL  TRADITION  217 

not  less  than  63-79  P^'"  cent,  were  thrown  out  as  un- 
fitted foe  the  higher  institutions  of  learning.  And  the 
government  was  quite  satisfied  with  such  results  of  the 
secondary-school  pedagogy.  For,  as  we  have  seen, 
since  the  second  quarter  of  the  nineteenth  century,  it 
has  always  found  that  the  spread  of  instruction  is  too 
great  in  Russia,  and  has,  therefore,  tried  to  diminish 
the  number  of  pupils  and  students  as  much  as  possible. 
The  increase  of  pupils  from  the  lower  classes  was 
found  particularly  alarming  when  compared  with  that 
of  pupils  from  the  nobility.  In  1833  more  than 
three-quarters  (78  per  cent.)  of  the  pupils  were  chil- 
dren of  the  gentry,  and  less  than  a  quarter  (17  per  cent. ) 
of  the  town  inhabitants,  peasants  (2  per  cent.),  and 
clergy  (2  per  cent.) ;  while  half  a  century  later  (1884) 
the  children  of  noble  birth  formed  less  than  half  (49.2 
per  cent.),  and  the  town  inhabitants  sent  twice  as  many 
as  before  (35.9  per  cent.),  the  peasants  nearly  four 
times  as  many  (7.9  per  cent.).  Then  in  1887  the 
minister  Delyanov  published  his  famous  decree  re- 
stricting the  number  of  Jewish  children  in  the  schools 
to  a  certain  maximum,  and  withholding  from  the 
school  the  children  of  the  lower  classes — "sons  of 
coachmen,  domestic  servants,  cooks,  laundresses,  green- 
grocers, and  such  people."  And,  indeed,  in  the  next 
years  the  percentage  of  pupils  of  noble  birth  mounted 
to  56.2  per  cent.  But  did  the  secondary  school,  as  Mr. 
Delyanov  expected,  avoid  breeding  those  feelings  of 
"discontent  with  the  conditions  of  life"  or  of  "bitter 
resentment  against  the  inequality  of  social  station 
which  was  unavoidable  by  the  very  nature  of  things"  ? 
The  state  of  mind  of  the  students  in  the  institutions 
for  higher  study  must  answer  this  question. 


2i8  RUSSIA  AND  ITS  CRISIS 

Nearly  all  of  the  Russian  young  people  who  have 
passed  through  the  schools  of  Demetrius  Tolstoy  are 
socialistic.     All  the  exertions  of  the  school  authorities, 
with  all  their  system  of  minute  police  supervision  and 
their  teaching  of  politically  indifferent  subjects,  has 
availed  nothing;   or,  rather,  this  very  system  has  con- 
tributed  to   produce   results   quite  opposite  to   those 
desired.    Russian  students  in  the  institutions  of  higher 
learning  play  now  the  part  which  German  students 
played  in  the  first  half  of  the  nineteenth  century,  when 
no  regular  political  life  existed  in  Germany.     With  an 
enthusiasm  and   self-sacrifice   far   surpassing  that   of 
the  German  secret  societies,  the  Tugendhiind  and  of 
the  Burscheiischaften,  Russian  students  promote  the 
cause  of  the  political  and  social   reform  of  Russia. 
Particularly  during  the  last  few  years  (since  1899), 
the  revolution  is,  as  it  were,  insistent  within  the  walls 
of  our  universities  and  academies.     Thus  the  task  of 
the  government  superintendence  has  grown  much  more 
complicated.  Difficulties  have  become  quite  insuperable 
in  this  department  of  higher  public  instruction.  Every- 
thing apparently  is  tried  by  the  authorities  to  repress 
the  movement.    Liberal  professors  have  been  banished, 
the  autonomic  statutes  of  the  universities  repealed,  and 
an   entirely   bureaucratic  organization    substituted    in 
their  place,  the  number  of  students  diminished,  the  fees 
increased,  the  system  of  collegiate  dwellings  founded, 
a  close  inspection  introduced  independent  of  univer- 
sity authorities  and  connected  with  the  superior  police, 
spies  provided  in  abundance,   student  gatherings  se- 
verely   forbidden,    a    representative    organization    of 
moderate  elements  brought  into  existence  under  the 


THE  POLITICAL  TRADITION  219 

close  supervision  and  personal  responsibility  of  the 
professors,  chosen  by  the  faculties  ("curators"); 
scholarships  and  other  foundations  have  been  used  for 
political  aims.  And  all  of  this  has  been  of  no  avail, 
and  is  not  likely  to  change  the  situation  in  the  future. 

What  is  now  the  reason  of  such  a  complete  and 
continuous  failure  of  all  measures  of  oppression? 
Here,  in  the  higher  schools,  we  may  on  a  small  scale 
observe  their  inefficiency  as  we  should  be  able  on  a 
larger  scale  to  infer  from  the  general  state  of  things 
in  the  whole  country.  Oppression  never  can  take  the 
place  of  measures  of  creative  policy.  Real  wants  and 
difficulties  are  not  overcome  when,  by  means  of  the 
enormous  strengthening  of  oppressive  measures,  they 
are  brought  to  comparative  silence.  And  besides,  this 
silence  will  never  prove  to  be  absolute. 

What  is,  then,  our  general  conclusion  on  behalf  of 
the  system  we  were  trying  here  to  describe  ?  We  may 
sum  it  up  in  two  questions  and  two  ans\vers. 

Can  the  government,  while  it  remains  what  it  now 
is,  namely,  a  mere  system  of  police,  hypocritically  sup- 
porting itself  on  fictitious  nationalistic  tradition,  leav- 
ing to  legislation  a  merely  fictitious  independence,  to 
administrative  power  a  likewise  fictitious  responsibility, 
to  the  judiciary  not  even  a  shadow  of  its  original  free- 
dom and  competency — can  a  government  such  as  this 
lighten  the  system  of  oppression  it  is  obliged  to  use 
against  any  free  utterance  of  an  enlightened  public 
opinion?  Can  it,  for  instance,  abolish  the  Ohrana,  the 
gendarmes,  the  system  of  political  spies,  re-establish 
regular  justice,  respect  the  rights  of  the  individual,  for- 
bear arbitrary  arrest  and  exile,  allow  the  population 


220  RUSSIA  AND  ITS  CRISIS 

liberty  to  meet,  to  read  whatever  they  wish,  to  speak 
pubHcly  about  poHtics  ?  Can  it  free  the  press  from  cen- 
sorship, the  schools  from  police  duties?  Of  course  it 
cannot,  without  denying  itself  in  essence. 

Now  comes  the  second  question :  Are  all  these 
measures  of  oppression  of  any  use,  of  any  final  conse- 
quence to  the  government?  Can  they  actually  prevent 
growing  irritation,  the  spread  of  political  knowledge, 
the  increasing  unity  of  oppositive  action,  the  consolida- 
tion of  political  parties  ?    They  certainly  cannot. 

To  a  certain  extent,  they  can,  perhaps,  delay  the 
movement,  and  they  must  greatly  increase  the  number 
of  political  victims.  But  the  living  forces  of  the  nation 
cannot  be  fettered  in  such  a  way.  A  living  force  is 
only  accumulated  by  the  resistance  it  meets  with. 
And  if  it  does  not  find  an  outlet,  after  all  pores  and 
safety-valves  have  been  stopped,  it  suddenly  breaks 
through,  like 

A    gentle    flood,    which,    being    stopped, 
The  bounding  banks  o'erflows. 

We  have  studied  enough  now  of  the  "bounding 
banks."  Let  us  study  the  "flood"  which,  from  being 
"gentle,"  presently  becomes  violent. 


CHAPTER  V 

THE    LIBERAL    IDEA 

One  of  the  conventional  lies  of  Russian  national- 
ism is  that  in  Russia  there  are  and  there  can  be  no 
political  parties.  Of  course,  such  a  political  condition 
as  was  described  in  the  previous  chapter  is  far  from 
being  favorable  to  the  formation  of  political  parties. 
No  regular  political  life  can  thrive  and  prosper  under 
the  system  of  police  oppression  that  we  have  spoken 
of.  Nevertheless,  beneath  the  surface  of  the  official 
uniformity,  differences  of  political  opinion  have  long 
existed  which  correspond  in  every  way  to  the  differ- 
ences of  political  parties  in  western  Europe;  and  those 
who  adhere  to  the  same  opinion  in  politics  to  a  certain 
extent  acknowledge  such  party  ethics  and  party  dis- 
cipline as  are  necessary  for  combined  political  action. 
The  scope  of  this  political  action  is  wide  enough, 
though  it  often  lies  in  such  fields  of  public  life  as  might 
be  expected,  under  more  normal  conditions  of  political 
life,  to  be  free  from  party  spirit.  Lacking  such  a  main 
road  of  politics  as  a  regular  representation  of  the  people 
would  offer,  political  agitation  has  deviated  from  the 
direct  route  and  fills  up  the  by-ways  or  breaks  new 
ground.  Science  and  fiction,  school  and  theater, 
learned  societies  and  establishments  for  charity,  uni- 
versities and  technical  institutions,  associations  for  self- 
help  and  self-culture,  provincial  councils  and  courts  of 
justice  —  none  are  free  from  party  politics  in  a  country 
where  political  parties  are  supposed  not  to  exist  at  all 


222  RUSSIA  AND  ITS  CRISIS 

and  political  life  to  be  confined  to  some  high  offices  of 
bureaucracy.  Of  course,  no  regular  party  organization 
exists  as  yet ;  but  even  this  is  only  a  question  of  time, 
perhaps  of  some  few  years.  An  organization  of  the 
more  advanced  groups  for  political  action  actually 
exists  in  the  only  form  that  is  now  possible — in  the 
form  of  secret  societies,  as  we  shall  see  later  on.  The 
more  moderate  elements  avoid  secret  organization,  but 
even  they  cannot  entirely  abstain  from  such  political 
intercourse  as  involves  in  itself  a  sort  of  elementary 
organization.  And  the  time  is  near  when  the  govern- 
ment will  understand  that  it  gains  nothing  by  keeping 
the  moderate  elements  scattered,  while  the  extreme 
ones  are  strong  and  skilled  enough  to  combine  in 
united  political  action. 

So  far,  at  least,  there  may  be  distinguished  two 
different  currents  of  Russian  political  opinion,  opposed 
to  the  government :  the  moderate  and  the  radical.  The 
former  has  always  been  called  in  Russia  by  the  party 
title  "  liberals  "  of  western  Europe.  The  latter  is  essen- 
tially socialistic.  These  political  groups  may  be  traced 
to  different  origins ;  their  followers  are  recruited  from 
different  social  layers.  Liberalism  is  chiefly  spread 
among  the  representatives  of  Russian  self-government, 
among  men  of  liberal  professions,  even  among  state 
ofticials ;  all  of  them  for  the  most  part  belonging  to  the 
old  Russian  gentry.  Radicalism  is  the  prevailing  color 
of  the  advanced  organs  of  the  press  and  of  men  of 
liberal  professions ;  among  our  youth  it  shades  off  into 
socialism.  We  shall  see  later  on  how  quickly  socialism 
is  becoming  the  doctrine  of  the  workingmen,  and  even 
of  the  peasants. 


THE  LIBERAL  IDEA  223 

Liberalism  is  of  old  date  in  western  Europe.  When 
it  first  appeared  as  a  systematic  policy,  its  political 
meaning  closely  corresponded  to  the  etymology  of  the 
term.  This  was  a  consistent  doctrine  of  individual 
liberty.  But  this  meaning  has  changed  much  with  the 
subsequent  development  of  political  life  and  theory. 
Liberalism  w^as  a  progressive  and  advanced  doctrine 
when  it  first  exposed  its  teachings  of  individual  free- 
dom to  the  mediaeval  privileges  of  social  orders  and  to 
the  arbitrary  rule  of  patriarchal  government.  But  the 
same  theory  of  individual  freedom  received  a  difi:erent 
interpretation  when  it  had  to  deal  with  the  democratic 
encroachments  of  the  modern  state.  If  liberalism  was 
to  preserve  its  place  as  an  advanced  doctrine,  then  it 
must  extend  its  meaning  so  as  to  cover  the  new  and 
enlarged  scope  of  state  activity.  If,  on  the  contrary,  it 
wished  to  remain  faithful  to  its  old  laissc:;-faire  doc- 
trine, then  it  would  necessarily  become  essentially  con- 
servative. Both  issues  were  resorted  to  in  different 
countries.  Where  political  life  dated  from  early  times, 
where  it  was  continuous  and,  so  to  speak,  organic  —  as 
was  the  case  in  England  —  the  meaning  of  the  old  party 
title  was  extended  in  order  to  preserve  the  unity  and 
the  continuity  of  the  party  action  as  long  as  was  pos- 
sible. Thus  liberalism,  by  a  curious  inversion  of  mean- 
ing, began  to  signify  the  idea  of  state  intervention  by 
way  of  social  legislation.  Of  course,  this  new  liberal- 
ism—  the  liberalism  of  Gladstone  and  of  Mr.  Chamber- 
lain of  twenty  years  ago  —  was  not  quite  like  the 
liberalism  of  Cobden  and  Bright.  Now,  in  countries  of 
a  more  recent  and  less  pacific  political  development  the 
other  issue  is  generally  taken :   the  old  party  title  is 


224  RUSSIA  AND  ITS  CRISIS 

worn  out  before  its  former  adherents  have  time  to 
change  or  to  extend  their  opinions;  then  it  is  thrown 
aside  by  the  more  advanced  groups,  while  remaining 
the  name  of  some  conservative  poHtical  group.  This 
is  the  case  in  Germany,  and  still  more  so  in  the  new 
Slavic  states,  where  "liberals"  merely  means  "con- 
servatives." 

Now,  in  Russia  the  meaning  of  the  term  "  liberal- 
ism "  is  at  once  extended  and  worn  out.  It  is  extended 
to  the  more  radical  groups,  particularly  in  the  press, 
for  the  simple  reason  that  every  more  advanced  term 
would  be  provoking  to  the  censor  and  thus  would  incur 
prompt  suppression.  The  original  meaning  of  liberal- 
ism was  the  more  easily  altered,  because  in  Russia  it 
was  not  bound  by  any  historical  recollections.  It  con- 
noted the  idea  of  state  intervention,  and  thus  became 
more  democratic,  without  being  inconsistent  with  a 
former  tradition.  General  ideas  are  easily  changed,  if 
they  remain  abstract,  not  being  embodied  in  any  system 
of  actual  party  policy.  At  the  same  time,  however,  the 
term  "  liberalism "  is  worn  out  in  Russia.  This,  of 
course,  is  not  because  the  liberal  program  is  already 
realized.  Far  from  being  so,  this  program  presents 
now  the  first  step  to  be  attained ;  and  this  is  recognized 
and  accepted  by  all  parties  in  Russia.  But,  of  course, 
this  first  step  is  not  acknowledged  to  be  the  only  one : 
political  freedom  and  individual  liberty  no  longer  seem 
to  be  the  absolute  good  that  they  were  considered  when 
the  era  of  liberty  dawned  in  France.  In  the  eyes  of 
subsequent  generations,  liberalism  was  rather  dis- 
credited as  a  sort  of  class  polic}'',  that  of  the  "third 
estate,"  and  thus  anti-democratic.    This  was  the  mean- 


THE  LIBERAL  IDEA  225 

ing  of  the  term,  which  was  already  largely  accepted 
and  current  in  Russia  long  before  any  continuous 
liberal  policy  could  be  outlined.  The  greater  number 
of  such  as  call  themselves  liberals  in  Russia  in  fact  hold 
to  the  more  advanced  opinions.  That  is  why  the  term, 
as  I  said,  is  worn  out,  without  having  actually  served. 
It  certainly  will  not  stand  the  slightest  strain.  With 
the  first  gust  of  political  liberty  it  will  yield  to  some 
more  advanced  term,  while  it  will  probably  remain  in 
use  to  designate  some  conservative  group. 

We  may  now  see  the  difference  between  the  liberal- 
ism of  Russia  and  that  of  western  Europe.  But  we 
shall  not  be  able  clearly  to  understand  the  reasons  for 
this  difference  unless  we  resort  to  a  historical  explana- 
tion. This  is  chiefly  to  be  sought  in  the  different 
structure  of  the  Russian  society  from  that  of  western 
Europe. 

It  is  well  known  that  European  liberalism  origi- 
nated in  the  struggle  of  the  bourgeoisie  —  the  wealthy 
and  enlightened  middle  class  of  city  inhabitants  —  with 
an  absolute  monarchy  and  the  privileged  landed  pro- 
prietors. Russia,  however,  did  not  possess  such  a 
bourgeoisie  as  that  of  w-estern  Europe,  and  such  as  it 
did  possess  was  neither  wealthy  nor  enlightened,  nor 
numerous  and  influential  enough  to  have  any  political 
weight  in  the  country.  To  be  sure,  in  Russia,  too, 
liberalism  was  directed  against  the  agrarian  class  of 
landlords,  and  particularly  against  their  right  to  pos- ' 
sess  serfs.  But  it  was  started  by  members  of  the  same 
class  of  agrarian  gentry  and  nobility,  and  the  pro- 
moters of  the  movement,  far  from  supporting  the  class 
interests,  undermined  the  social  position  of  the  nobility 


326  RUSSIA  AND  ITS  CRISIS 

and  destroyed  the  very  source  of  their  pohtical  power. 
In  doing  so  they  were,  of  course,  guided,  not  by 
class  considerations,  but  by  philanthropic  feehngs  and 
advanced  pohtical  theories.  Thus  they  represented, 
not  class  opinion,  but  general  public  opinion.  Russian 
liberalism  was  not  bourgeois,  but  intellectual  —  to  use 
the  French  terms.  Some  chief  features  of  Russian 
social  history  may  help  to  a  better  understanding  of 
what  has  just  been  advanced. 

We  must  not  dwell  long,  however,  on  the  absence 
of  bourgeoisie  and  the  insufficiency  of  Russian  middle- 
class  development.  We  know  already  that  for  the  most 
part  Russian  towns  originated,  not  in  the  necessities  of 
trade  and  commerce,  but  in  those  of  military  defense 
and  state  colonization.  We  may  add  now  that  they 
kept  their  original  character  for  a  long  time.  The 
commercial  population  of  the  towns  and  cities  was 
growing  very  slowly ;  the  inhabitants  for  the  most  part 
went  on  tilling  the  land  and  living  the  life  of  peasants, 
even  though  they  practiced  some  petty  craft  or  trade. 
But  even  such  city  inhabitants  formed  an  insignificant 
proportion  of  the  whole  population.  In  1630  the  entire 
number  of  city  inhabitants  was  292,000  —  about  2,9 
per  cent,  of  the  whole  population.  In  1724  it  was  still 
nearly  the  same,  namely  328,000  (3  per  cent.).  A 
century  later  the  city  population  increased  to  ten  times 
what  it  was  (3,025,000  in  1835),  but  even  then  the 
•proportion  to  the  whole  population  was  only  one  and 
one-half  times  higher  (5.8  per  cent.).  In  the  second 
half  of  the  nineteenth  century,  however,  the  increase  of 
the  city  population  went  on  more  quickly,  but  even  at 
the  present  time  (1897)  the  figures  are  16,289,000  — 
13  per  cent,  of  the  whole  population. 


THE  LIBERAL  IDEA  227 

Rich  merchants  who  were  counted  in  Muscovite 
Russia  only  by  tens  could  be  found  in  Moscow  alone, 
whither  they  were  transplanted  from  other  parts  of 
the  country  by  the  government  as  soon  as  they  became 
rich  in  some  provincial  town.  These  rich  men  were 
very  necessary  in  the  city :  they  were  intrusted  here  with 
the  collection  of  the  indirect  taxes,  and  they  were  made 
liable  by  all  they  possessed  for  the  accurate  gathering 
of  money.  Foreign  trade  was  entirely  in  the  hands  of 
foreign  companies  until  the  end  of  the  seventeenth 
century.  Peter  the  Great  introduced  factories,  but, 
with  the  exception  of  some  isolated  cases  of  prompt 
enrichment,  these  factories  gave  small  profits  and  had 
to  be  encouraged  by  government  subsidies.  In  the 
time  of  Catherine  II.  (1762-96),  when  the  possession 
of  factories  became  profitable,  noblemen  threw  them- 
selves into  the  business,  and  their  competition  made 
profits  fall.  After  a  short  attempt  at  free  trade,  in  the 
reign  of  Alexander  I.,  began  the  era  of  protectionism, 
which,  with  few  interruptions,  has  lasted  ever  since. 
This  system,  though  it  enabled  a  certain  number  of 
Russian  factory  owners  to  thrive,  did  not  give  them  a 
feeling  of  independence,  nor  did  it  contribute  much  to 
the  building  up  of  the  bourgeoisie,  in  the  western  Euro- 
pean meaning  of  the  word.  Indeed,  it  was  already  too 
late  to  form  such  a  class,  and  its  political  role  had  long 
been  usurped  by  other  social  elements. 

In  western  Europe  it  was  the  large  landed  property 
which  gave  political  power :  the  landed  proprietors,  the 
nobility,  contested  the  power  of  princes,  before  the 
bourgeoisie  came,  in  its  turn,  to  help  or  to  oppose  them. 
In   Russia,   owing  to  the  primitiveness  of  economic 


228  RUSSIA  AND  ITS  CRISIS 

development,  landed  property  did  not  give  so  much 
power  and  wealth.  And  so  the  possession  of  large 
estates  was  often  a  consequence  rather  than  a  founda- 
tion of  the  class  power  of  the  Russian  nobility.  Indeed, 
this  nobility  never  kncAv  how  to  preserve  such  landed 
property  as  it  took  possession  of.  It  acquired  or  lost 
property  according  to  the  gain  or  loss  of  its  political 
significance,  which  increased  or  decreased  for  quite 
other  —  that  is,  for  political  rather  than  economical  — 
reasons. 

When  Russian  autocracy  was  newly  born  (at  the 
end  of  the  fifteenth  and  the  first  half  of  the  sixteenth 
century),  it  was  attended  by  a  brilliant  court  of  princes 
and  boyars.  These  princes  had  just  been  dispossessed 
of  political  power  over  their  hereditary  properties,  in 
consequence  of  the  unification  of  the  Russian  state. 
Hardly  a  century  had  passed,  however,  before  there 
remained  almost  no  traces  of  these  large  hereditary 
estates  of  princes.  To  a  certain  extent  this  was  their 
own  fault,  because  Russian  aristocracy  never  could 
give  up  the  ancient  custom  of  an  equal  partition  of 
their  lands  among  the  heirs.  Nothing  like  the  English 
system  of  entail  ever  existed  in  Russia.  Thus  the 
largest  estates  were  scattered  and  dispersed  in  the 
course  of  a  few  generations.  The  representatives  of 
most  of  the  brilliant  and  aristocratic  families  were  to 
be  found  tilling  their  small  shares  of  land  as  simple 
peasants,  as  early  as  the  seventeenth  century.  But 
there  was  also  another  reason  for  this  rapid  impoverish- 
ment of  the  ancient  aristocracy.  This  was  the  con- 
sistent policy  of  the  Muscovite  princes,  who  were  quite 
conscious   of   the   aim    which    they   were   striving   to 


THE  LIBERAL  IDEA  229 

attain.  In  a  former  chapter^  we  have  seen  how  the 
ancient  landed  proprietors  were  despoiled  of  their 
properties  by  the  government.  This  was  particularly 
the  case  with  the  large  ducal  estates  of  former  sover- 
eigns and  high  vassals.  They  were  given  lands  in 
other  districts  of  the  country,  where  they  could  have 
no  hereditary  influence  on  the  inhabitants;  or,  as  a 
more  simple  method,  they  were  accused  of  the  lack  of 
fealty,  and  then  underwent  capital  punishment,  some- 
times "with  all  their  kin,"  as  one  of  them,  Prince 
Koorbsky,  says.  This  was  the  policy  of  John  IV.,  thie 
Terrible. 

One  of  John's  advisers,  a  political  writer  of  the 
time,  gave  him  good  advice  as  to  where  to  search  for 
support  in  this  struggle  against  the  aristocracy.  In 
order  to  be  able  to  "  play  with  magnates  as  little  chil- 
dren," he  says,  John  had  only  to  support  and  to  organ- 
ize the  gentry,  the  men  of  military  service.  We  have 
already  seen-  that  this  was  also  the  necessity  of  the 
time,  provoked  by  state  reasons  —  not  only  a  mere 
device  of  internal  policy.  Thus  the  gentry  took  the 
place  left  empty  by  the  decline  of  the  nobility  of 
ancient  lineage.  From  the  gentry  also  a  new  nobility 
was  to  be  enrolled.  This  was  the  nobility  of  state 
service.  Such  persons  as  were  higher  officials  became 
members  of  this  new  aristocracy.  And  this  new  aris- 
tocracy, being  more  dependent  on  the  Tsar  than  was 
the  ancient  order,  often  contrived  to  gain  large  landed 
estates.  The  most  important  of  them  were  such  as 
were  personally  related  to  the  Tsar.     But  this  kind  of 

'See  p.  157.  -'See  p.   150. 


230  RUSSIA  AND  ITS  CRISIS 

importance  was  not  at  all  stable.  According  to  their 
rise  or  fall,  their  big  landed  properties  came  into  exist- 
ence or  were  again  submerged  during  the  seventeenth 
century.  With  the  new  dynasty  of  the  Romanovs, 
which  was  of  comparatively  modest  origin,  members  of 
the  same  family  take  a  leading  place  among  Russian 
landlords;  during  the  next  reign,  that  of  Alexis,  his 
new  friend  and  relative  Morozov  comes  into  promi- 
nence; and  only  half  a  century  later  Romanovs  and 
Morozovs  disappear,  to  give  way  to  the  relatives  of  the 
new  Tsar,  the  Nareeshkins  and  the  Lopooheens. 

Amidst  this  constant  process  of  gain  or  loss  of 
influence,  no  independent  source  of  power  and  influ- 
ence could  persist.  The  only  power  was  that  given 
by  the  place  occupied  in  the  Tsar's  service :  the  current 
formula  was  that  "  Everybody  in  Moscow  was  great  or 
small  according  to  the  Tsar's  appointment."  Thus 
the  "appointment,"  the  "place"  in  the  Tsar's  service, 
became  the  chief  thing  which  everybody  strove  to  attain 
according  to  his  family  precedents.  The  great  w^ish  of 
everyone  was  not  to  be  "  diminished  "  (or  "  lowered  ") 
in  the  honor  of  service  from  the  position  which  had 
been  occupied  by  his  parents,  and  everybody  was 
closely  observed  by  everybody  else,  that  he  might  not 
achieve  such  promotion  in  service  as  would  throw  into 
the  background  his  competitors  from  equally  good 
families.  This  is  what  was  called  the  system  of  the 
"  struggle  for  places."  You  see  that  this  system  was 
not  conducive  to  the  development  of  a  feeling  of  unity 
among  the  members  of  the  upper  layer.  No  esprit  de 
corps  existed  among  the  Russian  aristocracy;  and 
nothing  like  an  idea  of  equality  among  its  members, 


THE  LIBERAL  IDEA  231 

the  idea  of  peerage,  could  possibly  be  evolved.  No 
other  chance  of  forming  a  "corporate  spirit"  existed 
for  the  lower  stratum  of  the  Russian  nobility,  the 
gentry  in  the  seventeenth  century.  Though  favored 
and  protected  by  the  government,  they  could  not 
become  really  influential  so  long  as  they  possessed  no 
class  organization,  and  had  no  opportunity  of  continu- 
ous touch  and  intercourse.  The  military  service 
exacted  from  them  was  intermittent  and  badly  organ- 
ized. Gentlemen  joined  their  regiments  of  cavalry 
only  when  their  regiments  were  quite  ready  to  march ; 
and  they  always  tried  so  to  manage  as  to  go  home 
before  the  campaign  was  ended.  They  had  no  definite 
place  in  the  regiment,  and  they  stood  where  they  liked, 
surrounded  each  by  his  servants.  Naturally  enough, 
the  government  was  not  satisfied  with  such  an  army, 
and  wished  to  have  a  standing  army  of  mercenary 
soldiers,  skilled  in  military  art  and  armed  with  fire- 
arms. Such  a  body  of  arquebusiers  existed  continu- 
ously from  the  days  of  John  IV.;  till  the  end  of  the 
seventeenth  century  they  played  the  part  of  janizaries 
in  Moscow^  About  1630  regular  infantry  also  began 
to  be  organized  in  the  country;  and  this  reform  was 
achieved  in  1670,  without  recurring  to  the  knights  of 
the  gentry.  The  military  role  of  the  Russian  gentry 
seemed  to  be  played  out  by  this  reform  of  the  Russian 
army.  New  regiments  for  regular  service  consisted  of 
enrolled  peasants  or  of  such  "  lower  ranks  of  serving 
men  "  as  were  not  socially  far  removed  from  peasants. 
The  officers  who  commanded  them  were  also  not  mem- 
bers of  the  gentry,  but,  nearly  all  of  them,  foreigners. 
The  ancient  cavalry  of  the  knights  of  the  gentry  thus 


232  RUSSIA  AND  ITS  CRISIS 

became  quite  antiquated,  and  their  military  help  could 
now  be  entirely  foregone. 

Thus  the  old  Muscovite  system  of  military  tenants 
of  the  state  was  in  its  decay  when  Peter  the  Great  began 
his  incessant  wars  and  his  civil  reforms.  Both  his  wars 
and  reforms  made  him  want  men ;  and  thus  with  Peter 
began  a  new  era  in  the  history  of  the  Russian  gentry 
and  aristocracy.  But  there  were  also  other  reasons 
which  made  him  restore  on  a  new  and  larger  basis  the 
lower  middle  class  of  the  "  men  of  service."  These  rea- 
sons were  the  same  as  had  led  John  IV.  a  century  and  a 
half  before.  Peter  disliked  and  distrusted  what  survived 
of  the  higher  Russian  nobility  down  to  his  time,  both 
the  nobility  of  birth  and  the  nobility  of  the  state  service. 
He  needed  the  social  support  of  lower  social  elements 
against  the  higher.  At  the  same  time  he  needed  it  also 
against  the  former  standing  military  corps  in  Moscow, 
which  was  meant  to  be  such  a  support,  but  which 
instead  had  grown  into  a  continuous  danger.  I  mean 
the  arquebusiers,  the  Moscow  janizaries  of  that  time. 
They  proved  particularly  turbulent  during  Peter's 
minority.  Now,  to  counterbalance  both  nobility  and 
janizaries,  Peter  formed  some  new  guard  regiments, 
largely  composed  of  men  of  the  gentry.  He  needed, 
however,  much  more  than  that;  he  needed  a  standing 
army  for  his  great  war  with  the  Swedes,  and  another 
army  of  officials  for  his  bureaucratic  institutions.  The 
old  class  of  the  "  state  servants  "  was  not  large  enough 
for  both  purposes.  It  had  to  be  remodeled  and  entirely 
recast  on  much  larger  foundations. 

This  was  what  Peter  did.  On  a  larger  scale  it  was 
what  John  III.  had  accomplished  when  he  first  formed 


THE  LIBERAL  IDEA  233 

the  class  of  military  men  of  service.  New  social  ele- 
ments were  now  again  to  be  resorted  to.  And  the 
principle  on  which  they  were  to  be  united  with  the 
former  elements  into  a  whole  social  group  was  just 
that  of  the  state  service. 

Peter  wanted  his  soldiers  from  the  old  gentry  to 
serve  "  from  the  very  foundations,"  as  he  expressed  it : 
they  were  to  be  obliged  to  start  as  simple  soldiers,  and 
they  were  to  be  regularly  promoted  to  the  rank  of  offi- 
cers. On  the  other  hand,  every  simple  soldier  taken 
from  any  other  social  layer  served  in  the  same  way  and 
passed  the  same  line  of  promotion,  until  he  became  an 
officer  and,  as  such,  was  considered  a  member  of  the 
gentry.  Thus,  to  the  extreme  dissatisfaction  of  the 
ancient  families  of  the  gentry,  the  entrance  into  their 
rank  was  kept  wide  open  for  new  "men  of  service." 
Its  social  composition  was,  once  more  in  Russian  his- 
tory, very  much  democratized,  and  its  social  importance 
very  much  lowered. 

The  same  system  of  mixing  up  the  social  elements 
by  means  of  a  central  notion  of  the  state  service  was 
applied  by  Peter  to  the  civil  service.  The  lower  ranks 
of  civil  service  had  formerly  been  filled  by  a  particular 
class  of  "  clerks,"  much  despised  by  the  gentry.  But 
now  that  civil  service,  with  the  introduction  of  the 
European  absolutism  and  bureaucracy,  had  gained 
much  in  importance,  Peter  wanted  the  gentry,  so 
reluctant  to  follow  his  orders,  to  mingle  with  the 
"clerks,"  In  civil  service  as  well  as  in  military,  an 
equal  system  of  promotion  in  rank,  without  regard  to 
social  extraction,  was  also  introduced.  Here  particu- 
larly the  ancient  principle  of  state  service,  of  "  appoint- 


234  RUSSIA  AND  ITS  CRISIS 

ment"  and  "place,"  far  from  being  abolished,  was 
carried  by  Peter  to  its  extreme  consequences.  From 
this  time  forward  there  existed  no  social  difference 
which  could  not  be  equalized  by  means  of  the  state 
service.  The  "  place "  or  degree  in  the  service,  the 
Chin  or  rank,  was  everything;  lineage  was  nothing. 
(Fourteen  ranks,  or  Chins,  were  to  be  passed  from  the 
lowest  to  the  highest,  in  established  order,  by  every 
"man  of  service.")  The  aristocracy  of  extraction  was 
thus  for  the  second  time  discarded  :  the  new  aristocracy 
of  Chin  took  its  place. 

To  be  sure,  this  new  aristocracy  was  not  like  that  of 
the  seventeenth  nor  that  of  the  sixteenth  century.  It 
was  neither  an  aristocracy  of  families  entitled  to  high 
service,  nor  was  it  an  aristocracy  of  ancient  lineage. 
But  still  it  was  an  aristocracy.  Its  privileges  of  state 
service  were,  of  course,  extended  to  every  social  layer ; 
still  they  remained  privileges.  The  Chin  abolished  the 
old  marks  of  extraction;  but  the  Chin  itself  now 
marked  the  line  between  such  as  possessed  it  and  such 
as  were  denied.  Thus  the  democratizing  of  the  state 
service  by  Peter  the  Great  served  as  a  new  start  in  the 
history  of  the  privileged  order,  and  was  followed  by  a 
new  development  of  the  class  spirit. 

The  ranks  of  the  new  aristocracy  of  Chin  were 
soon  filled  up.  It  included  the  few  that  remained  of 
the  former  two  aristocracies^  the  princes  of  the  six- 
teenth and  the  high  officials  of  the  seventeenth  century. 
But  the  greater  part  of  its  composition  was  entirely 
new,  and  was  particularly  dependent  on  the  liberality 
of  the  government.  The  new  courts  of  the  empresses 
Anna  (1730-40)  and  Elizabeth  (1741-61),  borrowing 


THE  LIBERAL  IDEA  235 

French  customs,  wanted  brilliancy,  and  demanded 
enormous  supplies  of  money.  Few  courtiers  were  able 
to  provide  for  these  expenses  out  of  their  hereditary 
estates.  The  greater  number  were  to  be  relieved  by 
the  government,  and  the  government  came  to  the  aid 
of  the  new  court  aristocracy  of  the  eighteenth  century. 
The  government  gave  them  places,  money,  profitable 
business :  it  was  blind  to  certain  illegal  ways  of  enrich- 
ment which  were  constantly  resorted  to ;  lastly,  it  gave 
them  most  liberal  grants  of  land  inhabited  by  the  state 
peasants;  i.  e.,  by  free  cultivators  who  thus  became 
serfs.  These  land  grants  became  most  numerous  just 
now,  when  no  need  of  them  for  the  state  service  existed. 
Catherine  II.  granted  800,000  peasants  to  her  courtiers 
(on  an  average  23,000  each  year).  Paul,  her  succes- 
sor, was  still  more  liberal :  he  gave  every  year  about 
120,000  peasants,  which  made  the  whole  sum  530,000. 
Many  large  estates  that  still  exist  date  from  this  period ; 
but  a  still  greater  number  of  the  estates  built  up  during 
his  time  have  again  disappeared. 

Together  with  these  grants  to  the  highest  order  of 
the  nobility,  the  gentry  as  a  whole  acquired,  in  the 
second  half  of  the  eighteenth  century,  a  kind  of  political 
influence  which  it  never  possessed  before ;  and  it  used 
this  influence  to  affirm  its  privileged  position.  The 
chief  foundation  of  this  new  power  of  the  gentry  was 
the  military  service  of  the  nobles  in  the  Petersburg 
guard  regiments.  After  having  liberated  Peter  the 
Great  from  the  fear  of  the  arquebusiers  of  the  seven- 
teenth century,  this  guard  of  noblemen  became  itself  a 
body  of  janizaries.  During  the  first  sixteen  years  after 
the  death  of  Peter  they  four  times  took  part  in  court 


236  RUSSIA  AND  ITS  CRISIS 

revolutions.  And  the  part  they  played  became  more 
and  more  important.  At  first,  in  1725,  they  were  used 
by  their  superiors  only  as  a  means  for  raising  the  wife 
of  Peter  the  Great,  a  simple  Livonian  peasant  girl,  to 
the  throne,  at  the  cost  of  his  legal  heir.  Five  years 
later,  in  1730,  the  noble  guards  themselves  raised  their 
voice  in  a  debate  over  the  form  of  government;  and 
practically  they  carried  out  the  resolution  of  their 
majority.  They  gave  back  autocratic  power  to  the 
empress  Anna,  after  their  more  advanced  colleagues 
had  failed  to  carry  into  execution  a  plan  for  a  constitu- 
tion. And  this  very  failure  was  also  characteristic  of 
the  rising  importance  of  the  gentry.  The  plan,  indeed, 
had  already  been  carried  out  by  the  high  officials 
of  the  superior  council,  who  had  just  made  the  newly 
elected  empress  sign  a  Russian  magna  charta.  But 
they  did  not  wish  the  gentry  to  share  in  their  political 
victory:  they  quarreled  with  the  liberal  officers,  and 
this  was  enough  to  make  them  quite  powerless.  Again, 
ten  years  later,  the  guards  deposed  a  regent,  and  some 
months  afterward  they  deposed  a  baby  sovereign; 
after  twenty  years  more  (1762)  they  were  to  depose 
an  adult  one,  for  the  benefit  of  Catherine  II. 

The  liberal  guard  officers  of  1730  aimed,  as  we  have 
seen,  at  attaining  a  political  ideal  of  their  own.  While 
sharing  in  the  theory  of  "  natural  law,"  they  wished  to 
realize  the  theoretical  right  of  the  people  to  choose  their 
sovereign,  and  to  determine  their  own  and  the  sover- 
eign's powers  in  legislation  and  government.  The  offi- 
cers of  1762  had  no  opportunity  of  formulating  their 
political  views ;  but  five  years  later  the  gentry  had  the 
opportunity  of  defending  their  class  interests  in  a  gen- 


THE  LIBERAL  IDEA  2i^ 

eral  assembly  of  deputies  called  together  by  Catherine 
11.^  This  time  the  ascendency  of  the  Russian  gentry, 
as  a  privileged  class,  was  achieved.  The  internal 
policy  of  Catherine  II.  was  entirely  turned  to  their 
profit.  Some  timid  steps  toward  the  emancipation  of 
the  peasants,  or  rather  toward  a  mere  limitation  of 
the  rights  of  the  landlords  over  their  serfs,  were  made 
by  the  empress  in  the  beginning  of  her  reign.  But  she 
took  them  back,  and  entirely  changed  her  policy  as  soon 
as  the  large  majority  of  the  gentry  assembled  in  1767 
raised  its  voice  against  this  reform.  In  the  following- 
years  Catherine,  more  than  any  other  ruler,  contributed 
to  the  transformation  of  the  Russian  gentry  into  a 
privileged  class.  Noblemen  were  definitively  liberated 
from  their  old  duty  toward  the  government  —  com- 
pulsory service  in  the  army.  At  the  same  time,  their 
serfs  and  their  landed  property,  which  until  then  they 
had  been  supposed  to  hold  from  the  state  on  the  con- 
dition of  service,  not  only  remained  in  their  possession, 
but  even  became  their  full  and  undisputed  private 
property.  For  the  first  time  in  Russia,  a  serf  began  to 
be  considered  by  the  law  as  a  thing  which  might  be 
owned  in  the  same  way  as  any  other  private  property. 
For  the  first  time,  also,  local  government  was  given  up 
to  the  elective  representatives  and  assemblies  of  the 
gentry.  It  seemed  that  a  foundation  was  thus  laid  for 
the  predominance  of  the  gentry  in  the  state,  and  that 
this  predominance  was  to  be  solid  and  lasting. 

Three  quarters  of  a  century  had  scarcely  passed, 
however,  before  this  privileged  position  of  the  gentry 
was  again  definitively  destroyed  ;  more  easily,  perhaps, 

^  See  p.  172. 


238  RUSSIA  AND  ITS  CRISIS 

than  it  had  come  into  existence.  Serfs  were  liberated. 
The  prevaihng  influence  of  the  gentry  in  the  local  gov- 
ernment was  undermined  and  practically  abolished, 
owing  to  the  introduction  of  a  new  system  of  self- 
government,  built  on  more  democratic  lines.^  The 
other  privileges  of  the  gentry  lost  their  significance, 
because  they  were  extended  to  other  classes.  How  can 
we  explain  such  a  rapid  and  easy  change? 

The  explanation  is  the  same  as  before.  The  privi- 
leged gentry  of  the  eighteenth  century  may  have  been 
distinguishd  by  the  high-sounding  title  of  the  "  well- 
born nobility  of  Russia;"  as  a  matter  of  fact,  they 
remained  what  they  always  had  been  :  humble  "  men  of 
service."  After  all  their  political  successes,  they  still 
preferred  the  "place"  in  the  service,  the  Chin,  to  any 
elective  office  in  their  class  self-government.  They 
went  on  considering  their  landed  property  as  a  sort  of 
reward  for  their  services  to  the  state,  and  did  not  wish 
to  devote  to  the  cultivation  of  their  estates  such  time  as 
could  be  better  employed  to  obtain  promotion  in  a  Chin 
in  military  or  in  civil  service.  They  still  clung  to  their 
old  idea,  that  they  served  the  state,  and  that,  recip- 
rocally, the  state  was  obliged  to  provide  for  their 
material  well-being.  In  short,  the  kind  of  historical 
tradition  they  cherished  prevented  them  from  facing 
the  new  position  of  independence  which  the  legislation 
of  Catherine  II.  opened  to  them.  No  wonder  that  the 
emancipation  of  their  serfs  took  them  quite  unawares, 
and  found  them  quite  unprepared  for  meeting  the 
necessities  of  their  changed  position.  In  the  modern 
struggle   of    free   competition,    that    they    were    now 

*  See  pp.  241-44. 


THE  LIBERAL  IDEA  239 

obliged  to  engage  in  on  equal  conditions  with  every- 
body, they  were  completely  beaten. 

Not  in  vain,  however,  did  they  invoke  their  old  tra- 
dition. At  this  moment  of  crisis  the  government  once 
more  came  to  their  aid.  We  know  already  that  just 
then  the  government  itself  was  changing  its  policy  of 
self-improvement  for  another  policy  of  self-defense. 
Everything  that  was  old  and  was  thought  to  be  of 
some  use  for  the  support  of  the  government  was  put 
under  the  protection  of  the  new  theory  of  "official 
nationalism."  Now,  the  gentry  had  really  served  the 
government  in  the  days  of  old.  Therefore  they  too 
were  to  be  fenced  about  and  preserved  for  some  future 
use,  as  a  particularly  nationalistic  institution.  Thus, 
curiously  enough,  Russian  noblemen  were  again  taken 
under  the  protection  of  the  government,  at  the  moment 
when  their  real  significance  for  the  state  had  become 
nil.  The  new  role  that  was  by  force  bestowed  on  the 
gentry  is  founded  on  a  fiction,  and  on  a  political 
ideology.  This  ideological  character  of  the  state  pro- 
tection is  best  shown  by  the  inefficiency  of  the  meas- 
ures taken  for  the  protection  of  the  gentry  after 
slavery,  their  chief  support,  had  been  taken  from  them. 
Measures  were  used  lavishly,  owing  to  Minister  Tol- 
stoy's policy.  They  formed  one  of  the  chief  objects  of 
the  legislation  of  Alexander  III.  (1881-94).  But,  in 
spite  of  all  these  measures,  the  decline  of  the  gentry  as 
a  class  went  uninterruptedly  on  its  way.  First  of  all, 
the  only  remaining  foundation  of  their  existence  as  a 
class,  their  landed  property,  quickly  melted  away. 
Before  the  liberation  of  the  peasants,  281  million 
acres  of  land  belonged  to  the  noblemen.     They  were 


240  RUSSIA  AND  ITS  CRISIS 

obliged,  in  the  process  of  emancipation,  to  sell  to  the 
peasants  70  millions  of  acres,  so  that  they  kept  after 
this  reform  211  millions,  and  received  for  the  remain- 
der ready  money,  which  might  have  been  used  for  the 
improvement  of  their  estates.  For  the  most  part,  how- 
ever, they  spent  that  money  quite  unproductively,  and 
were  soon  obliged  to  borrow  from  institiftions  of  credit. 
This  completely  ruined  them,  because  they  were  nearly 
always  unable  to  pay  the  interest  on  their  loans.  They 
lost  or  sold  their  estates,  so  that  now  they  possess  not 
more  than  143  million  acres.  Not  less  than  a  third 
part  of  the  estates  went  thus  to  possessors  from  other 
social  orders;  and  the  number  of  noble  proprietors 
diminished  at  the  same  time  from  123,000  to  102,000. 
This  decrease  would  have  been  greater  still,  had  not 
measures  been  taken  by  the  state  to  prevent  the  sale  of 
noblemen's  estates  for  debt.  In  1885  a  special  bank  for 
the  nobility  was  founded,  in  compliance  with  the 
demands  of  indebted  proprietors  of  the  landed  estates 
of  the  nobility.  This  bank  provides  for  cheaper  credit, 
and  took  so  small  a  percentage  for  loans  that  it  was  not 
able  to  cover  even  its  own  expenses  and  payments :  the 
loss  was  made  good  by  a  special  state  loan.  In  spite  of 
this,  noble  debtors  proved  most  unreliable  in  their  pay- 
ments. About  four  thousand  indebted  estates  are 
yearly  proposed  for  public  sale  by  the  bank  (of  which 
number  about  one  thousand  to  twelve  hundred  belong 
to  insolvent  debtors),  and  yet  only  some  thirty-three  of 
these  estates  are  actually  sold  by  auction.  All  the  rest, 
so  far  from  fulfilling  their  obligations  toward  the  bank, 
simply  manage  to  put  ofif  their  payments,  owing  to 
their  personal  influence,  or  to  pay  such  a  small  sum  as 


THE  LIBERAL  IDEA  241 

will  satisfy  the  bank  officials,  who  very  well  know  that 
the  government  does  not  wish  them  to  be  too  severe 
toward  the  "men  of  state  service."  And  when  such 
unpaid  money  grows  to  a  certain  amount,  it  still  may 
be  added  to  the  capital  debt  (or  paid  by  way  of  an  addi- 
tional loan  from  the  same  bank),  and  the  debt  thus 
increased  may  be  permitted  to  be  amortized  in  a  longer 
term.  Thus  the  official  figures  quoted  above,  so  far 
from  showing  the  full  amount  of  economic  ruin  and 
distress  of  the  gentry,  rather  disguise  the  real  condition 
of  things.  Only  in  case  the  nobility  had  been  treated 
as  ordinary  debtors  would  the  actual  magnitude  of  the 
evil  instantly  have  appeared. 

But  there  is  another  way  in  which  the  government 
tried  to  make  good  the  material  losses  of  the  nobility 
after  the  emancipation  of  the  peasants.  While  losing 
economic  predominance,  the  nobility  wished  to  pre- 
serve, and  even  to  enlarge,  their  power  in  local  admin- 
istration and  justice.  They  strove  to  attain  such  a 
position  as  English  squires  and  magistrates  possessed 
in  parish  and  county,  before  the  Reform  Bill  of  1832 
had  been  passed.  But  the  general  tendency  of  that 
time  (1864)  was  rather  adverse  to  class  legislation. 
Civic  equality  was  the  prevailing  idea  of  the  reformers. 
Thence,  the  first  statute  for  local  self-government 
(1864)  based  local  representation,  not  on  the  differ- 
ences of  social  orders,  but  on  the  quantity  of  landed 
property.  Noblemen  had  to  elect  their  delegates 
together  with  other  landed  proprietors,  while  other 
orders,  the  peasants  and  the  city  inhabitants,  were  also 
admitted  to  representation ;  they  chose  their  delegates 
in  separate  conventions.     Still,  even  here  the  predomi- 


242  RUSSIA  AND  ITS  CRISIS 

nance  in  the  local  government  remained  with  the  gen- 
try, which  made  up  the  large  majority  of  private  pro- 
prietors, and  so  dominated  entirely  their  convention. 
But  this  did  not  yet  seem  sufficient,  and  a  further  step 
was  taken  in  order  to  give  the  representatives  of  this 
first  convention  a  prevailing  role  in  the  composition  of 
the  provincial  assemblies.  In  300  districts  (out  of  the 
whole  number  of  318)  they  were  permitted  to  elect 
more  than  a  third,  and  in  200  of  them  half  the  repre- 
sentatives of  all  three  orders;  and  thus  they  became 
quite  a  leading  group  in  the  assemblies.  Altogether 
they  possessed  6,204  seats  out  of  13,024  {i.  e.,  48  per 
cent. ) ,  while  the  peasants  were  entitled  to  choose  only 
5,171  delegates  (f.  e.,  40  per  cent.),  and  the  town 
inhabitants  1,649  (^-  ^v  12  per  cent.). 

How  much  out  of  proportion  these  figures  were 
with  the  actual  numerical  relation  of  the  classes  we 
may  gather,  if  we  remember  that  the  48  per  cent,  of 
delegates  from  private  land-owners  represented  a 
group  of  not  more  than  480,000  private  proprietors, 
and  that  out  of  this  number  every  fourth  man  was 
a  nobleman,  and  every  tenth  man  was  entitled  to 
vote;  meanwhile  the  40  per  cent,  of  the  peasant  mem- 
bers represented  a  solid  mass  of  22.4  million  poll-tax 
payers,  who  were  the  collective  proprietors  of  the  Rus- 
sian village  communities;  and  the  12  per  cent,  of  town 
delegates  represented  about  three  million  of  the  male 
inhabitants.  In  approximate  figures,  this  will  give  one 
delegate  for  eight  electors,  who  were  generally  noble- 
men taken  from  eighty  private  proprietors  of  all 
orders;  one  delegate  for  1,800  male  inhabitants  of  a 
town ;  and  one  delegate  for  4,300  peasant  rate-payers. 


THE  LIBERAL  IDEA  243 

The  interests  of  the  nobihty  cannot  be  said  to  have 
been  neglected  by  the  reformers.  And,  indeed,  the 
influence  of  the  nobihty  over  the  activity  of  the  provin- 
cial assemblies,  or  Zemstvos,  was  decisive.  In  such 
questions,  e.  g.,  as  local  taxation  they  unfailingly  used 
this  influence  for  the  profit  of  their  class.  Still  the 
general  tendency  of  the  Zemstvos  was,  as  we  soon  shall 
see,  liberal  (and  even  in  the  matter  of  taxation  they 
often  advocated  a  progressive  income  tax).  The  con- 
servatives were  not  slow  to  infer  that  this  liberalism 
was  due  to  the  system  of  elections.  The  tendency  of 
uniting  different  social  orders  in  the  same  conventions, 
and  of  bringing  them  together  in  Zemstvos,  they  were 
sure  to  trace  back  to  the  principles  of  the  great  French 
Revolution.  They  thought  that  the  remedy  was  to 
be  found  in  the  re-establishment  of  pure  class  repre- 
sentation, with  the  entire  predominance  of  the  ancient 
ruling  class  of  the  gentry.  It  was  taken  for  granted 
that  the  enforced  representation  of  the  gentry  would 
change  the  liberalism  of  the  councils  into  a  kind  of 
nationalistic  conservatism.  Thus,  by  the  new  statute 
of  1890  the  general  number  of  electors  and  their  repre- 
sentatives was  diminished  (the  number  of  electors  had 
formerly  been  226,174,  except  peasants;  now  they 
were  only  80,000,  35,000  of  them  being  noblemen). 
The  non-noble  electors  were,  so  far  as  possible, 
excluded ;  a  number  of  votes  were  transferred  from 
the  peasants  to  landed  proprietors;  and  the  elective 
heads  of  the  district  nobility  were  made  members  of 
assemblies  without  further  election.  The  new  com- 
position of  the  district  assemblies  was  now  as  follows: 


244  RUSSIA  AND  ITS  CRISIS 

Representatives  of  landed  owners       -        -        .        .        .    5,433 

(S7.i   per  cent.,   instead   of  the   former  48  per   cent., 

I  representative  from  6.4  electors.) 
City    inhabitants    ---------     1,273 

i^33    per     cent.,     i     representative     from     36    house 

proprietors.) 
Village    communities    --------    2,817 

9,523 

Of  course,  the  representation  had  now  become  still 
more  artificial,  and  the  choice  of  the  delegates  from  the 
nobility  had  deteriorated,  because  places  were  now 
more  numerous  than  candidates,  and,  not  being  respon- 
sible to  any  large  constituency,  the  delegates  did  not 
sufficiently  appreciate  the  importance  of  their  mandate. 
At  the  same  time.  Zcmstvos  were  made  much  more 
dependent  on  administrative  authorities;  their  elected 
heads  and  members  of  the  executive  boards  were  joined 
to  the  state  service,  which  made  them  feel  responsible 
to  the  Ministry  of  the  Interior,  instead  of  to  their 
electors. 

With  all  this,  however,  was  the  political  aim  of 
the  new  reform  attained  ?  Was  there  no  more  liberal- 
ism in  the  provincial  and  district  assemblies?  We  soon 
shall  see  that  the  liberal  flame,  far  from  being  extin- 
guished, reappeared  at  least  as  large  and  as  intense  as 
before. 

We  must  mention  here  a  further  measure  taken  to 
increase  the  local  influence  of  the  gentry.  The  theo- 
rists of  the  ruling  class,  as  I  have  said,  wished  to  give 
them  the  direct  right  of  governing  the  local  population, 
jurisdiction  and  the  right  of  punishment;'^  in  short,  a 

*  There  was  such  an  office,  the  "  justices  of  the  peace  "  elected 
by  the  Zemstvos  according  to  the  statute  of  1864;    but  it  did  not  at 


THE  LIBERAL  IDEA     '  24S 

discretionary  power  that  would  remind  you  more  of 
the  power  of  an  autocrat  than  of  that  of  an  EngHsh 
landlord  of  the  eighteenth  century.  The  original 
aspirations  of  the  conservatives  were  hardly  to  be  car- 
ried out,  being  too  barbarous  even  for  such  a  country 
as  Russia ;  still  the  government  yielded  to  their  pres- 
sure, and  in  1889  the  "  district  commanders  "  (Zcmskca 
Nachalnekee)  were  introduced.  But  even  this  meas- 
ure came  too  late  to  raise  the  social  importance  of  the 
decaying  gentry.  The  government  used  the  new  local 
office  of  Zcuisky  Nachalnik  for  its  own  ends,  not  for 
the  ends  of  the  nobility.  The  nomination  was  made 
dependent  on  the  will  of  the  local  governor,  and  the 
appointed  "district  commanders"  are  in  all  they  do 
responsible  to  the  governor.  Thus  they  are,  in  fact, 
officials  of  the  ministry;  or,  again,  "men  of  serv- 
ice," not  men  of  credit  and  influence  among  the  local 
nobility.  During  the  first  few  years  of  their  existence 
the  "  district  commanders  "  still  showed  some  examples 
of  the  wild  independence  and  energy  worthy  of  the 
ancient  "landlords;"  but  afterwards  they  were  so 
often  criticised  by  their  superiors,  condemned  for  their 
overbearing  deeds  by  tribunals,  blamed  by  the  senate, 
subjected  to  the  sarcastic  criticisms  and  derision  of  the 
press,  that  their  initial  resoluteness  was  shaken,  their 
arrogant  abuse  of  power  became  rarer,  and  finally  they 
acquiesced  in  playing  the  role  of  secondary  police  offi- 
cials, who  unhappily  still  preserve  their  judiciary 
rights  and  their  discretionary  power  in  the  village,  but 
who,  sooner  or  later,  will  be  deprived  of  them. 

all  satisfy  the  promoters  of  the  noblemen's  interests,  because  this 
office,  so  far  from  possessing  discretionary  power,  was  confined  to 
the  branch  of  mere  jurisdiction. 


246  RUSSIA  AND  ITS  CRISIS 

After  this  short  sketch  of  the  social  history  of  the 
nobihty  and  gentry,  we  may  now  judge  how  much  the 
Russian  nobihty  and  gentry  always  needed  the  sup- 
port of  the  government,  how  much  they  owed  to  the 
government  their  past  and  actual  possessions,  of  how 
small  importance  they  would  have  been  if  left  to  their 
own  resources  of  wealth  and  power,  and  how  hopeless 
is   their   economic   future.      As   we   now   know,   the 
nobility  was  too  dependent  on  the  government,  and 
presented   too   few   elements   of   political   opposition. 
This  is  particularly  clear  in  the  role  it  played  when  a 
question  of  most  momentous  significance  and  of  vital 
importance  for  it  was  being  resolved  by  the  govern- 
ment—  the  emancipation  of  the  peasants.     A  reform 
that  in  other   European   countries  might   have  been 
achieved  only  very  gradually  or,  if  at  once,  only  by  the 
help  of  a  social  revolution,  in  Russia  was  decided  by 
the  autocratic  power,  met  with  no  opposition  except 
mere  grumbling  and  some  clandestine  intrigues,  and 
was  carried  out  in  a  most  decisive  manner  by  an  insig- 
nificant  minority   of   idealistic   men   of   action.      To 
explain  this,  we  may  quote  the  following  words  of 
Count  Strogonov,  one  of  the  intimate  friends  of  young 
Alexander  I.    Count  Strogonov,  as  early  as  the  begin- 
ning of  the  nineteenth  century,  wished  to  prove  that 
the  danger  consisted,  not  in  abolishing  serfdom,  but  in 
preserving  it,  because  not  the  discontent  of  the  nobility, 
but  that  of  the  people,  was  to  be  feared.     "  What  is 
nobility?  "  he  asked.    And  his  answer  follows : 

It  is  formed  of  a  great  quantity  of  people  who  became  noble- 
men only  by  way  of  service,  who  have  received  no  education, 
whose  thoughts  are  so  directed  as  not  to  conceive  anything  other- 
wise than  as  arising  from  the  authority  of  the  emperor.     They 


THE  LIBERAL  IDEA  247 

have  no  idea  of  right  or  of  law  that  could  generate  in  them  the 
smallest  resistance  to  the  government.  Such  of  them  as  have  been 
more  carefully  educated  are  not  numerous,  and  they  are  for  the 
most  part  imbued  with  a  spirit  that  is  in  no  way  contrary  to  the 
reforms  of  the  government.  Such  noblemen  as  have  made  their 
own  the  true  idea  of  justice  will  sympathize  with  the  measure  in 
question ;  the  remaining  majority  will  not  reason  much  about  it, 
but  only  chatter  a  little.  Where  are  now  the  elements  of  dan- 
gerous discontent?  But,  on  the  other  hand,  there  are  nine  millions 
of  people  scattered  through  all  the  empire,  everywhere  feeling 
equally  the  heaviness  of  their  slavery.  They  possess  a  common 
sense   that    astonished    the   men    who   knew    them    well.      From 

their  very  childhood  they  have  been  filled  with  hate At 

all  times  it  has  been  the  peasants  who  have  shared  in  disturb- 
ances,  and  never  the  nobility What  had  not  been   done 

against  the  rights,  nay,  even  against  the  personal  safety,  of  the 
nobility  during  the  reign  of  Paul  ?  If  ever  there  had  been  reason 
for  growing  disquiet,  it  was  then.  But  had  they  even  thought  of 
resistance?  Quite  the  contrary.  Every  measure  that  aimed  at 
violating  the  rights  of  the  nobility  had  been  carried  through  with 
astonishing  accuracy;  and  it  was  a  nobleman  who  had  brought 
measures  into  action  that  were  directed  against  his  brethren,  that 
were  contrary  to  the  interest  and  honor  of  his  order. 

This  was  said  sixty  years  before  the  emancipation 
(i8ot),  but  the  general  situation  remained  during  a 
century  nearly  the  same.  When  Catherine  II.  first 
opened  up  the  question  of  emancipation,  she  told  her 
reluctant  helpers  that  the  peasants  would  soon  or  late 
themselves  take  their  liberty  from  the  hands  of  the 
landlords,  if  their  burdens  were  not  alleviated.  And 
Alexander  11.  some  four  years  befor-e  the  emancipation 
repeated  the  same  assertion  to  the  nobility  of  Moscow : 
"  It  is  better  that  liberty  should  come  from  above  than 
from  below." 

This  brings  us  back,  then,  to  the  question  from 
which  we  started  in  our  discussion  of  Russian  social 


248  RUSSIA  AND  ITS  CRISIS 

history.  We  asked  :  In  what  classes  ot  Russian  society 
would  HberaHsm  be  Hkely  to  find  support?  And  we 
have  now  the  answer :  The  nolDihty  as  a  class  was  too 
weak,  even  as  to  questions  touching  its  very  existence, 
to  oppose  the  government.  But  the  nobility,  as  the 
most  educated  body  in  the  empire,  supported  the  gov- 
ernment in  carrying  out  measures  directed  against  itself 
as  a  class.  In  fact,  the  great  measure  of  the  emancipa- 
tion of  the  peasants  was  first  proposed,  always  sup- 
ported, and  finally  carried  into  execution  by  the  liberal 
minority  of  the  gentry.  Emancipation  was  the  chief 
plank  in  their  political  platform  during  the  whole  first 
period  of  their  public  activity. 

This  aim  was  attained  in  1861 ;  and  the  emancipa- 
tion of  the  peasants  brought  with  it  the  economic  ruin 
of  the  gentry  class.  Then  began  a  second  period  in  the 
history  of  Russian  liberalism  —  a  period  of  struggle 
for  political  liberty.  This  second  aim.  however,  proved 
much  fnore  difficult  to  attain ;  for  the  educated  gentry 
had  now  to  fight  against  autocracy,  whereas  during  the 
first  period  they  merely  helped  autocracy  against  their 
own  class.  In  the  beginning  of  this  their  new  struggle 
no  other  class  sided  with  them,  though  millions  of 
serfs  had  backed  the  struggle  for  emancipation.  More- 
over, in  espousing  the  cause  of  political  liberty,  they 
were  suspected  by  groups  more  radical  than  their  own 
of  selfishly  pursuing  their  class  interests.  Constitu- 
tionalism, therefore,  was  doomed  as  aristocratic;  and 
this  for  nearly  a  generation  spoiled  the  liberal  plea. 
Twenty  years  later,  public  opinion  became  more  favor- 
able to  political  reform;  but  "the  educated  gentry" 
as  a  separate  social  group  was  no  longer  there;  other 


THE  LIBERAL  IDEA  249 

voices  were  heard,  louder  and  more  determined  than 
theirs.  The  struggle  was  resumed  by  an  educated 
minority  of  "mixed  ranks." 

Indeed,  the  main  characteristic  of  this  second  period 
of  Russian  liberalism  is  that  the  educated  gentry  were 
no  longer  the  only  social  milieu  from  which  political 
struggle  originated.  Owing  to  ''the  great  reforms" 
of  the  sixties,  new  and  more  democratic  social  elements 
had  meanwhile  come  upon  the  political  stage,  and  this 
new  condition  changed  greatly  the  very  program  and 
character  of  the  political  struggle.  The  new  genera- 
tion was  very  desirous  not  to  be  taken  for  the  old-style 
lil^erals.  The  radical  elements  had  so  differentiated 
themselves  from  the  liberal  ones  that  liberalism,  from 
being  the  general  condition  of  every  educated  mind, 
had  become  the  moderate  political  doctrine  of  a  cer- 
tain group.  In  any  country  enjoying  political  freedom 
liberalism  under  such  conditions  would  have  reduced 
itself  to  the  modest  and  efficient  role  of  a  doctrine  for 
the  "  leisure  class."  In  Russia,  however,  even  after  its 
differentiation  from  radicalism,  liberalism  remained 
what  it  had  been  before  —  a  movement  patriotic  and 
philanthropic  rather  than  professionally  political ;  and 
its  program,  instead  of  becoming  the  representative 
opinion  of  landed  and  moneyed  interests,  followed  the 
general  trend  of  public  opinion,  until  by  and  by  it 
became  more  democratic  and  radical.  And  this  situa- 
tion can  change  only  when  political  reform  has  been 
achieved  in  Russia. 

Now  that  these  general  outlines  of  the  history  of 
Russian  liberalism  have  been  made  clear,  let  us  proceed 
to  a  more  detailed  exposition  of  the  subject.    In  its  first 


250  RUSSIA  AND  ITS  CRISIS 

Stage,  the  struggle  against  serfdom,  it  is  chiefly  the  his- 
tory of  Russian  pubHc  opinion.  In  its  second  stage, 
the  struggle  for  political  freedom,  it  is,  however,  the 
history  of  a  political  party. 

The  beginnings  of  public  opinion  in  Russia  are 
closely  connected  with  the  establishment  of  the  first 
institutions  for  higher  study.  These  were  the  "  Corps 
of  Nobility"  started  by  the  empress  Anna  in  1732,  and 
the  Moscow  University  founded  by  the  empress  Eliza- 
beth in  1755.  Both  institutions  were  intended  for  the 
education  of  noblemen.  The  first  generation  of  edu- 
cated noblemen  graduated  from  these  schools  was  not 
likely  to  throw  itself  into  any  political  activity.  Their 
prevailing  interest,  according  to  the  general  taste  of 
that  time,  was  essentially  literary  and  sesthetic.  The 
theater,  poetry,  and  novels  attracted  them  as  in  the  first 
half  of  the  eighteenth  century  these  same  things  did 
the  western  European  public.  In  the  second  half  of 
that  century  literature  and  fiction  gave  way  to  phi- 
losophy and  politics ;  and  in  either  line  more  advanced 
ideas  gradually  took  the  place  of  the  more  moderate 
ones.  Rousseau  and  Diderot,  Helvetius  and  Holbach, 
eclipsed  Montesqieu  and  Voltaire.  And  the  Russia  of 
1 750-1800  conscientiously  followed  each  stage  of  this 
European  development.  The  above-mentioned  genera- 
tion of  1740-50,  enjoying  the  refinements  of  the  newly 
introduced  European  culture,  was  followed  by  the 
more  politically  developed  generation  of  1760  (the 
beginning  of  the  reign  of  Catherine  II.).  This  latter 
generation  still  believed  in  the  "enlightened"  legisla- 
tion of  absolute  monarchs,  and  was  ready  to  support 
the  wise  rulers  by  widening  their  knowledge  and  sing- 


THE  LIBERAL  IDEA  251 

ing  their  praise.  After  the  failure  of  Catherine's 
enHghtened  legislation,  the  third  generation  —  that  of 
1770  —  appeared.  The  members  of  this  generation  no 
longer  credited  the  rulers  with  wisdom  and  had  become 
sure  of  the  deliberate  "wickedness"  of  the  rulers.  In 
politics  they  wished  public  initiative  to  take  the  place 
of  bureaucratism ;  in  education  they  insisted  upon  the 
development  of  the  personal  will. 

Thus,  the  men  of  the  two  generations — 1760  and 
1770  —  represented  the  first  independent  political  opin- 
ion in  Russia,  and  were  the  first  to  oppose  this  opinion 
to  the  policy  of  the  government.^  It  was  easier  for 
that  generation  than  for  their  predecessors  of  1750  to 
assume  an  independent  attitude  toward  the  govern- 
ment, since  they  were  no  longer  in  direct  touch  with 
the  court,  as  the  first  "  intellectuals  "  had  been.  They 
formed  independent  private  circles  in  the  capital  and  in 
the  provinces.  In  politics  they  professed  democratism, 
and  stood  up  for  the  "  vile  "  taxable  multitude  of  the 
village  and  of  the  borough,  as  against  the  privileged 
few  of  their  own  class.  In  religion  they  opposed  the 
stern  morality  and  the  mysticism  of  freemasons  to  the 
easy-going  materialism  and  worldly  frivolity  of  St. 
Petersburg  high-life. 

This  generation  tried  to  influence  public  opinion 
first  as  journalists.  In  their  periodicals,  among  verse 
and  fiction,  under  the  literary  disguise  of  satire,  more 
serious  matters  were  introduced.  They  spoke  against 
the  social  and  legal  privileges  of  the  rich  and  the 
"  well-born ; "  they  undertook  the  defense  of  the  poor 

"As  we  have  seen  (pp.  26,  46,  172),  this  policy  turned  to 
reaction. 


252  RUSSIA  AND  ITS  CRISIS 

and  the  downtrodden.  But  this  satire  proved  too  mor- 
bid, and  too  much  imbued  with  the  spirit  of  criticism 
and  opposition,  to  be  tolerated  by  Catherine  II.  We 
have  seen  how  vain  was  her  endeavor  to  allow  the 
liberal  journalists  to  advocate  her  own  cause.  Having 
failed  in  this,  she  attempted  to  fight  them  with  their 
own  weapon,  and  to  this  end  started  her  own  literary 
organ,  in  which  she  was  to  take  reveng^e  on  recalcitrant 
journalists  by  exposing  them  to  pubic  derision. 

But  the  satire  of  the  empress  was  not  so  efficient  a 
challenge;  and  then  her  irritated  majesty  resorted  to 
sharper  methods.  One  by  one  the  more  advanced 
periodicals  were  suppressed.  But  even  this  measure 
did  not  cause  the  advanced  circles  to  surrender. 
Thrust  out  from  the  field  of  journalism,  they 
endeavored  to  act  through  private  schools  and  by 
means  of  editorial  activity.  They  were  busy  printing- 
books,  organizing  the  sale  and  spread  of  them  in  prov- 
inces where  no  books  had  until  then  existed;  and 
finally,  by  organizing  public  charity  on  a  larger  scale 
than  it  had  ever  before  existed,  they  started  in  phi- 
lanthropic activity  for  the  benefit  of  the  lower  classes. 

The  very  fact  of  there  being  a  private  organization 
for  public  activity  was  unusual  in  Russia,  and  was  con- 
sidered to  be  a  provocation  to  the  government.  So  the 
circles  of  friends  were  closely  watched  by  the  govern- 
ment as  suspicious  and  dangerous.  They  came  to 
be  particularly  suspected  when  the  philanthropists 
founded  a  kind  of  secret  organization  in  connection 
with  the  masonic  lodges  abroad.  For  no  political  ten- 
dencies had  existed  in  the  Russian  masonry,  which 
rather  had  been  absorbed  in  mystical  "works"  and 


THE  LIBERAL  IDEA  253 

moral  self-improvement.  But  political  tendencies  ha\- 
ing  been  discovered  in  a  branch  of  the  European 
masonry  —  the  "  Illnminates  "'  —  Catherine  II.,  who 
knew  scarcely  anything  of  the  uirferences  between  the 
various  masonic  systems,  would  be  certain  to  find  these 
same  tendencies  existing  in  the  Russian  lodges.  And 
she  thought  her  suspicion  fully  confirmed  when  the 
renowned  book  of  Radeeshchev^  appeared  (1790). 
Catherine  was  quite  certain  that  the  author  belonged 
to  the  Moscow  "ring"  of  freemasons,  whose  activity 
was  especially  objectionable  to  her.  And  just  then  also 
she  was  particularly  alarmed  at  the  horrors  of  the 
French  Revolution.  The  book  of  Radeeshchev  was 
the  last  straw,  and  so  Catherine  began  a  formal  perse- 
cution of  the  whole  group  of  liberals,  though  Radeesh- 
chev stood  in  no  direct  connection  with  the  advanced 
masons  in  Moscow.  Radeeshchev  was  sent  to  Siberia ; 
Noveekov,  the  leader  of  the  Moscow  circle  —  and  the 
most  eager  initiator  and  promoter  of  every  kind  of 
activity:  literary,  educational,  editorial,  and  philan- 
thropic—  was  imprisoned  for  several  years;  and  many 
of  his  friends  likewise  suffered. 

The  book  of  Radeeshchev  thus  inaugurated  the  first 
political  persecution  of  public  opinion  in  Russia.  And 
with  full  historical  right,  for  it  contains  the  first  politi- 
cal program  of  Russian  liberalism.  A  cursory  glance 
into  the  book  shows  this  clearly.  After  a  thorough  criti- 
cism of  the  bureaucratic  regime  in  Russia,  the  author 
proposed  as  necessary  reforms :  the  emancipation  of 
the  peasants,  the  abolition  of  the  privileges  of  the 
nobility,  and  the  liberty  of  the  press  and  of  religious 

'  See  p.  26. 


254  RUSSIA  AND  ITS  CRISIS 

belief.  He  also  contemplated  national  representation 
and  constitutional  government  as  a  corollary  to  previ- 
ous reforms.  In  the  book  of  Radeeshchev  Russian 
liberalism  thus  became  of  age,  and  immediately  entered 
upon  its  first  open  conflict  with  the  government. 

How  this  conflict  ended  we  have  seen.  Yet  this 
end,  violent  as  it  was,  looks  harmless  and  innocent  when 
compared  with  the  issue  of  the  second  conflict  between 
the  government  and  public  opinion. 

The  second  conflict  was  that  of  the  December  rebel- 
lion of  1825.^  A  certain  period  passed  between  the  first 
conflict  and  the  second.  And  this  interval  corresponds 
to  a  break  in  the  continuity  of  the  development  of  Rus- 
sian public  opinion.  It  finds,  also,  its  counterpart  in 
western  Europe :  the  period  of  reaction  against  the 
French  Revolution  and  of  the  Napoleonic  wars.  This 
break  of  continuity  is  filled  by  the  attempts  at  political 
reform  by  Emperor  Alexander  I.,^  but  in  his  liberal 
attempts  the  Tsar  was  not  sufficiently  supported  by 
public  opinion,  which,  owing  to  the  national  irritation 
against  Napoleon,  was  at  that  time  rather  jingoistic  ;^*^ 
while  liberalism  was  governmental  and  officially 
accepted. 

The  real  revival  of  liberalism  among  the  educated 
classes  of  Russian  society,  however,  began  first  with 
the  end  of  the  Napoleonic  wars;  and  this  liberalism 
was  not  transmitted  by  tradition  descended  from  the 
time  of  Radeeshchev;  rather  it  was  generated  at  an 
independent  source  and,  as  a  matter  of  fact,  it  was  then 
first  christened  by  the  European  name  of  "  liberalism." 

The  new  oppositionary  current  originated  in  fresh 

*See  pp.  176,  177.  "See  p.  173.  "See  p.  51. 


THE  LIBERAL  IDEA  253 

foreign  impressions  procUiced  on  the  men  of  the  gen- 
try class  by  European  events.     A  great  many  Russian 
noblemen   were   as   officers   obliged   to    remain    some 
years  in  western  Europe,  and  particularly  in  France, 
with  their  regiments.     After  the  Congress  of  Vienna 
(181 5)  they  came  back  to  Russia  greatly  influenced  by 
what  they  had  seen  abroad.    Their  habits  of  life  and  of 
thinking  became  now  quite  different  from  those  gener- 
ally prevalent  in  St.  Petersburg;   and  they  laid  much 
stress  on  publicly  professing  their  new  opinions  and 
practicing  their  new  habits.     In  a  society  in  which 
drinking  and  card-playing  were  the  only  social  enter- 
tainments, they  drank  no  spirits ;  they  played  no  game 
but  chess ;  they  read  political  newspapers,  then  existing 
only  in  foreign  languages,  and  talked  diplomacy,  his- 
tory, and  current  politics.    In  their  capacity  of  commis- 
sioned officers,  they  treated  their  soldiers  humanely  and 
began  to  build  primary  schools  for  the  instruction  of 
their  men.     In  a  word,  they  were  the  "austere  men," 
the  "puritans,"  of  the  northern  capital,  as  our  poet 
Pooshkin  called  them.     Naturally  enough,  they  could 
not    abstain    from    criticising    loudly    whatever    they 
deemed    the   limitations    and    deficiencies   of   Russian 
political  and  social  life  as  compared  with  that  of  west- 
ern Europe.    Not  that  they  were  sworn  oppositionaries ; 
far  from  it,  they  were  quite  willing  to  give  the  govern- 
ment whatever  help  they  could,  should  the  government 
endeavor  to  promote  culture  and  the  public  welfare. 
For  this  outspoken  aim  —  of  helping  the  government 
—  the  young  officers  even  resolved,  encouraged  l)y  the 
example  of  the  German  youth,  to  form  a  society,  whose 
statutes  were  copied  from  those  of  the  Tiigcndbund. 


2S6  RUSSIA  AND  ITS  CRISIS 

The  emperor  himself  knew  these  statutes  of  the  "  so- 
ciety for  pubHc  welfare,"  and  could  not  find  in  them 
anything-  objectionable  or  dangerous.  To  attain  the 
aim  of  the  society,  which  was  "  to  help  the  government 
promote  Russia  to  a  higher  degree  of  grandeur  and 
welfare,"  every  member  chose  one  of  four  branches  of 
public  activity :  philanthropic,  instructive,  juridical,  or 
economic. 

In  regard  to  philanthropy,  this  society  intended  to 
organize  regular  public  help  for  paupers  and  tramps, 
and  for  the  old  and  infirm.  In  provincial  towns  it 
planned  labor  bureaus.  The  landed  proprietors  were 
to  be  persuaded  by  the  members  to  behave  properly 
toward  their  peasants.  The  aims  of  enlightenment 
were  to  be  attained  by  the  personal  example  of  a  virtu- 
ous life,  as  well  as  by  dint  of  publicly  preaching  moral 
and  social  duties.  The  members  were  also  obliged  to 
spread  true  ideas  about  education,  to  educate  their  own 
children  accordingly,  and  to  open  new  schools.  In 
literature,  poetry,  and  art  they  were  to  promote  social 
tendencies,  and  also  to  spread  the  knowledge  of  the 
social  sciences.  Members  of  the  juridical  branch  were 
to  obtain  magistracies,  and  to  influence  provincial 
society  by  exposing  to  the  censure  of  public  opinion 
arrogance  and  servility,  injustice,  bribery,  and  every 
kind  of  abuse  in  the  state  service.  They  were  also  to 
oppose  the  retailing  of  peasants  by  the  landowners.  In 
the  economical  branch  the  members  were  obliged  to 
promote  useful  industries  and  oppose  monopolies. 
And  in  the  country  districts  a  scheme  of  insurance  for 
general  disasters  was  planned. 

All  this  was  quite  harmless ;  and  there  was  no  need 


THE  LIBERAL  IDEA  257 

to  conceal  this  kind  of  activity  from  the  authorities. 
The  break  in  Hberal  tradition  seemed  to  have  brought 
its  fruits,  for  the  Hberal  program  of  the  beginning  of 
the  nineteenth  century  looked  far  less  offensive  than 
that  of  Noveekov  and  Radeeshche  v.  The  young  officers 
evidently,  lacked  the  practical  grip  of  their  predecessors 
and  testified  by  their  action  to  a  rather  abstract  book- 
knowledge  of  political  life,  while  exhibiting  a  good  deal 
of  political  sentimentalism  in  their  aims  and  methods. 

But  that  was  a  time  when  political  education  was 
abundantly  supplied  by  the  facts  of  current  political 
life;  and  very  soon  the  Russian  liberals  had  a  chance 
to  profit  by  fresh  experience.  Just  then  the  political 
situation  in  western  Europe  had  entirely  changed.  The 
period  of  revolutions  of  the  second  decennium  began; 
and  this  period  was  closely  followed  by  reactionary 
measures  of  the  various  governments,  led  by  Metter- 
nich.  The  period  of  "fraternization"  between  "na- 
tions" and  "governments,"  which  began  with  the  wars 
of  1813-14,  was  soon  left  behind.  "Governments" 
were  accused  by  liberals  of  having  "cheated"  their 
"peoples,"  after  they  had  no  more  need  of  their  mili- 
tary enthusiasm ;  all  the  fine  promises  had  now  to  be 
wrung  from  the  governments  by  armed  force. 

Of  course,  the  sympathy  of  the  Russian  liberals  was 
with  the  "  people  "  and  their  new  revolutionary  leaders. 
The  young  Russian  officers  worshiped  the  new  national 
heroes,  the  Riegos  and  the  Pepes,  at  the  very  time  when 
Alexander  I.  allowed  his  "  Holy  Alliance  "  to  drift  into 
a  merely  reactionary  channel,  and  finally  renounced  his 
constitutional  project  of  1819."      The  internal  policy 

"  See  p.  174. 


258  RUSSIA  AND  ITS  CRISIS 

of  the  Russian  government  henceforth  had  to  be  that 
of  Metternich.  "  Secret  societies  "  and  masonic  lodges 
were  formally  forbidden;  the  recently  opened  (1819) 
societies  for  the  building  of  primary  schools  on  the 
"  Lancaster  method  of  mutual  instruction "  were 
closed ;  even  the  Russian  branch  of  the  Bible  Society, 
which  had  enjoyed  the  particular  protection  of  the 
emperor,  and  which  in  some  few  years  of  its  existence 
had  become  the  center  of  a  large  educational  move- 
ment, propagating  itself  over  all  Russia,  had  to  cease 
its  activity.  In  the  newly  (since  1S02)  opened  Russian 
universities  (particularly  in  Kazan  and  Petersburg)  a 
formal  persecution  of  liberal  professors  was  begun,  and 
new  programs  were  planned,  according  to  which  phi- 
losophy was  to  be  taught  on  the  basis  of  the  epistles  of 
Paul,  the  science  of  politics  was  to  be  based  on  Moses 
and  Solomon,  in  medicine  the  salutary  action  of  prayer 
was  to  be  particularly  recommended,  and  in  natural 
science  the  wisdom  of  God  was  to  be  exalted  and  man's 
knowledge  to  be  proved  insufficient. 

In  the  face  of  all  these  reactionary  measures,  Rus- 
sian liberalism  soon  changed  its  original  character.  The 
moderate  and  optimistic  "  Society  of  Welfare "  was 
closed  by  its  own  founders  ( 1821 ).  But  this  was  done 
only  in  order  that  new  secret  societies  might  be  put  in 
its  place,  of  a  more  resolute,  and  even  revolutionary, 
character.  They  were  two :  one  in  St.  Petersburg,  the 
so-called  "  Northern  Society,"  formed  chiefly  by  officers 
of  the  guards;  and  the  other,  the  "Southern,"  in  the 
general  quarters  of  the  southern  army.  Both  contem- 
plated political  reform ;  but  the  Northern  remained 
more  moderate,  and  was  satisfied  with  claiming  a  mon- 


THE  LIBERAL  IDEA  259 

archical  constitution :  while  the  Soutliern,  led  by  Colo- 
nel Pestel,  dreamt  of  a  federative  republic  after  the 
American  pattern.  So  far.  the  aspirations  of  both  were 
chiefly  of  a  political,  not  of  a  social,  nature;  and  their 
methods  were  those  of  a  political  revolution,  attained 
by  means  of  a  military  pronunciamento.  Encouraged 
by  the  first  successes  of  the  Italian  and  Spanish  revolu- 
tions, both  societies  formed  similar  schemes;  and  the 
moment  for  starting  a  military  revolution  was  already 
decided  upon,  when  the  death  of  Alexander  I.  com- 
pelled the  conspirators  to  act  immediately,  and  so  much 
the  more  as  the  conspiracy  had  already  been  detected  by 
the  government.  The  meager  results  of  the  December 
rebellion  (1825)  have  been  shown.'-  With  it  the  second 
conflict  of  Russian  liberalism  with  the  government 
came  to  an  end.  A  new  break  in  political  development 
ensued,  and  when,  after  a  shorter  interval  than  before, 
the  movement  was  again  started,  it  had  no  longer  the 
character  of  the  western-European  liberalism  —  a  char- 
acter to  which  the  political  movement  of  the  reign  of 
Alexander  I.  adhered  more  closely  perhaps  than  any 
similar  movement  ever  did  again  in  Russia. 

Indeed,  we  know  that  during  the  following  reign 
of  Nicholas  I.  public  opinion  in  Russia  became  national- 
istic :  from  liberalism  it  turned  to  romanticism,  from 
politics  to  philosophy.'-^  And  at  the  same  time  there 
appeared  in  western  Europe  new  social  teachings  that 
found  their  way  into  Russia  and  in  a  curious  way 
amalgamated  with  the  nationalistic  teachings.  Thus 
far  the  romantic  movement  became  to  a  certain  extent 
democratic,   while   remaining  consciously  anti-liberal. 

'■  See  p.  176.  "  See  p.  52. 


26o  RUSSIA  AND  ITS  CRISIS 

We  shall  see  in  the  following  chapter  how  this  demo- 
cratic tendency  came  to  be  emphasized,  and  how,  with- 
out entirely  ceasing  to  be  nationalistic,  the  movement 
became  socialistic. 

Thus,  with  the  failure  of  the  December  insurrec- 
tion, pure  liberalism  had  lost  its  only  chance  of  prevail- 
ing in  Russian  public  opinion.  And  the  government 
of  Nicholas  I,,  by  having  repudiated  it  entirely,  also 
lost  the  only  chance  peacefully  to  carry  out  a  moderate 
political  reform.  While  stubbornly  sticking  to  what 
we  know  as  a  system  of  "official  nationalism,"^'* 
Nicholas  himself  opened  the  way  for  the- ascendency  of 
an  opposite  political  extreme  in  the  public  opinion  of 
Russia.  These  extremes,  too,  seemed  to  be  more  natur- 
ally connected  with  each  other  than  with  the  excluded 
middle.  Nationalism  repudiated  liberalism  as  being 
too  cosmopolitan,  too  much  of  a  chahlone.  Socialism 
saw  in  liberalism  its  chief  enemy  —  "individualism" 
embodied,  as  was  the  fact  in  western  Europe.  More- 
over, to  both  nationalism  and  socialism,  liberalism  was 
not  democratic  enough.  If  even  in  Russia  it  was  not 
the  policy  of  the  bourgeoisie  which  as  yet  had  no 
existence  there  —  it  was  still  looked  at  askance  as  the 
policy  of  the  educated  gentry.  In  short,  both  national- 
ism and  socialism  were  equally  averse  to  liberalism 
proper.  And,  besides  cardinal  points  of  theoretical 
divergence,  there  was  an  additional  practical  reason, 
peculiar  to  Russia,  which  might  explain  why  liberalism 
could  not  exist  in  an  atmosphere  where  both  national- 
ism and  socialism  of  the  old  type  throve  and  prospered 
side  by  side.  With  all  its  deficiencies  and  limitations,  so 

"See  p.  i8i. 


THE  LIBERAL  IDEA  261 

far  as  theory  is  concerned,  liberalism  always  stood  for 
a  certain  system  of  actual  policy ;  while  both  national- 
ism and  socialism,  as  they  appeared  in  the  Russia  of 
that  time,  were  but  abstract  theories,  easily  satisfied 
with  some  prospect  of  future  glory,  toward  which  from 
the  detestable  present  actuality  no  positive  way  was 
leading. 

This  explains  why  the  Russian  government,  which 
already  had  had  enough  political  experience  to  recog- 
nize in  liberalism  a  politically  dangerous  tendency  de- 
cidedly contradictory  to  the  very  essence  of  autocracy, 
had  not  found  much  to  be  feared  in  the  nationalistic 
dreams  and  socialistic  experiments  of  the  Utopian 
school.  Nay,  there  was  even  a  moment  —  a  very  short 
one,  indeed  —  when  the  Hegelian  nationalists  and  the 
admirers  of  Fourier  could  flatter  themselves  with  the 
hope  of  receiving  direct  help  from  the  Russian  govern- 
ment for  the  prosecution  of  their  aims,  exactly  for  the 
reason  that  they  were  equally  opposed  to  "politics." 
Much  additional  political  experience  was  needed,  how- 
ever, to  convince  Russian  socialism  of  the  necessity  of 
reconciling  itself  with  the  anti-autocratic  tendencies  of 
liberalism;  and  a  still  longer  stage  of  political  educa- 
tion would  appear  to  be  needed  by  the  Russian  govern- 
ment before  it  will  decide  to  make  one  with  political 
reformers.  This  experience  and  this  education  might 
have  been  given  by  nothing  short  of  an  actual  political 
struggle.  But  for  any  actual  struggle  the  atmosphere 
of  Nicholas's  reign  was  too  close  and  stifling,  while  the 
educated  class  was  as  yet  too  fresh  in  making  politics, 
and  too  much  given  instead  to  a  kind  of  abstract  politi- 
cal  philosophy;    and,   beside   the   gentry,   there   were 


262  RUSSIA  AND  ITS  CRISIS 

under  the  rule  of  serfdom  no  other  social  elements  to 
take  part  in  political  action.  Thus  it  was  that,  every 
form  of  political  life  being  absolutely  lacking,  the  few 
Russian  "intellectuals"  of  the  time  reveled  in  absolute 
doctrines,  and  came  short  of  any  scheme  for  immediate 
practical  action  in  "politics." 

And  so,  with  very  few  exceptions,  the  reign  of 
Nicholas  makes  a  blank  sheet  and  means  an  interrup- 
tion in  the  history  of  Russian  liberalism.  Moreover,  it 
fostered  a  disposition  of  mind  toward  liberalism  which 
could  only  be  prejudicial  to  its  future.  This  fact 
explains  a  great  deal  in  the  subsequent  political  history 
of  Russia. 

First,  there  must  be  taken  into  consideration,  in 
order  to  explain  what  may  seem  a  contradiction  of  this 
statement,  the  ascendency  of  liberalism  in  the  brilliant 
era  of  "great  reforms"  of  Alexander  II.  —  an  era 
which  closely  followed  the  end  of  the  reign  of  Nicholas 
I,  One  may  ask :  How  could  liberalism  have  been 
weakened  during  the  reign  of  Nicholas,  if  immediately 
at  its  close  it  was  able  to  produce  such  an  outburst  of 
public  criticism  and  indignation  against  this  very  reign  ? 
How  could  the  progressive  movement  have  been  lack- 
ing in  a  positive  program,  when  such  a  program  was 
unanimously  proposed  to  the  government  by  Russian 
public  opinion  ?  It  is  impossible  to  answer  these  ques- 
tions without  discriminating  between  two  different 
currents  of  political  opinion,  in  order  the  more  accu- 
rately to  determine  the  place  of  each  in  inspiring 
reforms,  in  carrying  out  these  reforms,  and  in  modify- 
ing original  schemes  of  reform  in  their  very  realization. 

To  be  sure,  the  great  reforms  of  the  new  Tsar, 


THE  LIBERAL  IDEA  26^ 

Alexander  II.,  were  not  a  l)it  nationalistic,  and  they 
did  not  look  very  radical;  they  were  essentially  liberal. 
Even  the  great  measure  of  the  emancipation  of  serfs,  so 
much  suspected  of  nationalism  and  radicalism  by  con- 
temporary liberals,  was  carried  out  on  principles  judged 
by  both  nationalists  and  radicals  as  too  individualistic 
and  liberal  —  too  much  infected  with  the  laissez-faire 
doctrine.  Then  there  was  the  momentous  introduction 
of  local  self-government,  where  liberalism  was  to  find 
its  chief  stronghold,  although,  owing  to  its  very  limite<l 
vote  and  exceedingly  moderate  tendencies,  this  institu- 
tion was  severely  criticised  and  caricatured  by  the 
radicals.  In  the  third  place,  there  was  a  new  system  of 
tribunals,  consisting  of  justices  of  the  peace  for  smaller 
affairs  and  for  voluntary  jurisdiction,  of  regular  courts 
of  appeal  and  revision  for  civil  suits,  and  of  a  jury  for 
criminal  affairs ;  all  strictly  drawn  on  the  line  of  Euro- 
pean (and  particularly  French)  judicial  institutions. 
As  the  leading  principles  of  this  reform  there  were 
recognized  public  and  oral  procedure,  instead  of  the 
former  secret  and  registered,  and  permanent  tenure  of 
office  and  independence  for  the  judges,  instead  of  the 
former  mixture  of  the  magistracy  with  civil  offices  of 
administration.  These  were  all  things  too  badly  wanted 
in  Russia's  past,  and  too  persistently  claimed  by  every 
advanced  representative  of  public  opinion,  not  to  be 
enthusiastically  hailed  both  by  the  democrats  and  the 
liberals,  and  even  the  nationalists,  without  distinction 
of  party.  Of  the  same  description  was  the  universally 
needed  law  of  the  press,  which  we  have  to  mention  in 
the  fourth  place.  Far  from  being  radical,  even  the 
name  of  "  liberal "  can  be  applied  to  it  only  in  Russia, 


264  RUSSIA  AND  ITS  CRISIS 

and  in  a  very  limited  sense,  as  its  contents  and  origin 
are  both  very  conservative.^^ 

Certainly,  the  "great  reforms"  of  Alexander  II. 
were  liberal;  and  it  is  because  of  their  liberalism  that 
they  proved  to  be  neither  durable  nor  consistently 
enough  developed.  There  were  some  people  for  whom 
they  were  too  liberal ;  and  these  people  were  naturally 
opposed  to  the  fixed  establishment  of  such  laws.  There 
were  some  other  people  for  whom  the  reforms  had  the 
disadvantage  of  being  only  liberal ;  and  these  persons 
withheld  that  moral  support  without  which  there  was 
no  chance  of  a  full  and  consistent  development.  Though 
tlie  objections  came  from  different,  and  even  opposite, 
sides,  their  practical  result  was  the  same ;  namely,  that 
the  liberal  reforms  fell  victim  to  a  united  disaffection, 
no  matter  whether  conservative  or  radical.  This  ex- 
planation may  serve  to  prove  the  seeming  paradox  we 
have  advanced. 

Indeed,  we  shall  never  be  able  to  understand  why 
the  "era  of  great  reforms"  so  soon  came  to  its  close; 
why  the  most  important  of  them  —  the  political  repre- 
sentation—  has  remained  unrealized,  and  why  the 
shortcomings  of  the  others  were  so  great,  unless  we 
consider  how  much  liberalism  was  weakened  by  its 
variance  both  with  the  nationalistic  and  democratic  cur- 
rents of  public  opinion. 

In  order,  then,  to  make  our  explanation  quite  clear, 
let  us  trace  this  fundamental  disunion  among  the  ad- 
vanced groups  of  public  opinion  to  its  historical  origin ; 
namely,  to  the  conflict  in  which  they  became  involved 
while  carrying  out  the  greatest  of  the  "  great  reforms  " 

"  See  p.  204. 


THE  LIBERAL  IDEA  265 

—  the  "  emancipation  of  the  peasants."  We  shall  soon 
see  that  this  original  clash  contained  in  germ  the  whole 
subsequent  development  of  political  parties  during  the 
reign  of  Alexander  II. 

After  the  long  strain  of  public  indignation  and  dis- 
content, endured  under  the  reactionary  rule  of  Nicholas 
I.,  had  broken  out  after  Nicholas's  death,  which  coin- 
cided with  the  humiliating  disaster  of  the  Crimean 
war,  the  emancipation  was  the  first  reform  to  be  carried 
out.     As  yet  there  w^ere  no  differentiated  political  par- 
ties in  Russia,  but  everybody  agreed  as  to  the  general 
assertion  that  the  origin  of  all  disasters  and  shortcom- 
ings in  Russian  public  life  was  to  be  traced  to  the  dis- 
trust of  the  government  in  public  opinion,  and  to  the 
distressing  self-assertion   of  the   ruling  bureaucracy, 
which  pretended  to  know  better,  to  be  omniscient  as 
w^ell  as  omnipotent.    Autonomy,  self-government,  pub- 
licity, an  effective  control  of  society  over  bureaucracy 
—  such  was  at  that  time  the  general   cry  of  public 
opinion.     At  complete  variance  with  this  settled  public 
opinion,  how^ever,  the  first  reform  —  a  reform  of  tre- 
mendous importance  —  w^as  being  carried  out  without 
resort  to  public  opinion,  by  the  actual  methods  of  the 
discredited  bureaucratic  regime.     These  methods  were 
deliberately  resorted  to  by  some  few  democratic  nation- 
alists at  the  head  of  the  chief  offices  in  St.  Petersburg, 
in  order  to  avoid  and  to  crush  beforehand  the  expected 
opposition   from  such   elements  of  public  opinion  as 
were  suspected  of  "  landlordism."     The  real,  the  new 
democracy,  just  then  in  process  of  formation,  looked 
wistfully  to  the  work  of  the  St.   Petersburg  bureau- 
cracy, and  as  far  from  disapproving  their  ccntralistic 


266  RUSSIA  AND  ITS  CRISIS 

methods  of  reform,  rather  accused  these  bureaucrats  of 
not  having  thrown  their  uncontrolled  power  to  the  full 
on  the  side  of  the  liberated  peasants. 

This  was  the  tangled  situation  that  caused  the 
liberal  elements  of  the  provincial  gentry  to  disown 
their  liberal  colleagues  in  the  St.  Petersburg  chanceries, 
and  at  the  same  time  accuse  them  of  demagogism ;  an 
indictment  to  which  the  St.  Petersburg  democrats  — 
both  the  pretended  and  the  real  —  replied  by  accusing 
the  educated  gentry  of  "  landlordism."  This  mutual 
embitterment  was.  all  the  greater  in  that  the  St.  Peters- 
burg bureaucracy  had  tried  to  avoid  the  open  conflict 
and  sauvcr  Ics  apparcjiccs  in  the  emancipation  reform. 
The  landed  proprietors  from  the  country  were  invited 
to  participate  in  the  preparation  of  the  reform  in  spe- 
cially organized  local  committees  of  nobility;  and  the 
whole  reform  was  supposed  to  be  founded  on  the 
"voluntary  agreements"  of  landlords  with  their 
former  serfs.  Not  less  than  forty-six  provincial  com- 
mittees, containing  1,366  representatives  of  noble 
proprietors,  were  at  work  during  eighteen  long  months 
preparing  their  own  drafts  of  the  emancipation  law. 
Of  course,  they  were  sure  to  have  a  hand  in  the  final 
solution  of  the  question.  But  very  soon  they  became 
aware  that  all  they  had  done  was  a  mere  blind  —  mere 
show  and  sham ;  that  the  real  question,  in  all  its  essen- 
tial aspects,  had  already  been  solved  in  St.  Peters- 
burg, in  a  sense  not  at  all  acceptable  to  themselves. 

Who,  then,  were  these  dictators  in  St.  Petersburg? 
There  was  no  mistake  about  them !  It  was  not  the 
Tsar,  whose  opinion  on  this  matter  had  been  very 
shifty;  it  was  not  some  grand  duke  or  grand  duchess; 


THE  LIBERAL  IDEA  267 

it  was  not  the  ministers  —  they  who  were  never  ex- 
pected to  have  an  unwavering  opinion;  it  was  a  few 
young  men  from  their  own  class  —  the  gentry  class  — 
chosen  by  the  government  for  a  sham,  but  belonging 
rather  to  a  clique  of  "  journalists  "  and  "demagogues"  : 
a  certain  Millyoutin.  a  Solovyov,  a  couple  of  Slavophil 
fanatics  like  Samarin  and  Prince  Cherkassky;  alto- 
gether not  more  than  a  dozen  secondary  officials,  sure 
of  themselves,  and  arrogantly  prescribing  their  laws  to 
"all  the  Russias." 

Of  course,  those  men  of  St.  Petersburg  invited 
deputies  from  the  above-mentioned  local  committees 
to  come  up  to  the  northern  capital  with  their  drafts 
of  law;  but,  first  they  took  particular  pains  to  have 
come  not  only  the  representatives  of  conservative 
majorities  of  the  committees,  but  also  representatives 
of  insignificant  minorities,  as  democratic  and  radical 
as  themselves.  And  then,  too,  they  had  given  the 
invited  deputies  no  chance  for  an  open  and  collective 
discussion ;  they  did  not  produce  their  own  draft  of 
fhe  law;  they  simply  asked  questions  —  individual 
questions  from  individual  representatives  —  on  the  sub- 
ject of  each  one's  individual  opinions;  and  such  opin- 
ions as  were  formulated  by  deputies  were  not  even 
recorded  or  protocolized.  Evidently  these  opinions 
were  liable  to  be  thrown  aside  and  forgotten  as  soon  as 
the  sitting  of  the  central  "  committee  "  was  over.  This 
caused  even  the  liberal  representatives  of  the  gentry  to 
feel  uneasy  and  nervous.  They  united,  therefore,  with 
the  conservatives  in  a  common  scheme  to  ask  the  Tsar 
to  admit  them  to  a  collective  discussion  of  law  in  the 
central  commission.     But  they  were  harshly  reproved; 


268  RUSSIA  AND  ITS  CRISIS 

and  then  the  only  chance  left  them  was  their  right  of 
petition  to  the  central  power,  which  the  statute  of 
Catherine  II.  gave  to  their  local  assemblies.  They  left 
for  their  homes  determined  to  use  that  right;  so  dis- 
appointed and  hurt  were  they  by  their  cool  reception  in 
the  Tsar's  palace. 

Such  was  the  origin  of  the  first  political  demon- 
strations in  the  local  assemblies  of  the  nobility.  The 
period  of  these  demonstrations,  beginning  with  1858, 
ends  only  with  the  opening  of  new  assemblies  of  local 
self-government  according  to  the  law  of  1864.  The 
character  of  these  demonstrations  was  very  mixed, 
since  liberal  and  conservative  elements  shared  in  them 
without  distinction.  "  Bureaucracy  "  was  their  general 
target;  actual  representation,  their  final  aim.  But 
"bureaucracy"  was  equally  objectionable  to  men  of 
quite  opposite  political  views:  to  democrats  and  per- 
sonal friends  of  the  St.  Petersburg  "  demagogues,"  as 
well  as  to  such  conservatives  to  whom  these  latter  were 
nothing  but  new  Catilines  —  the  destroyers  of  social 
order.  Again,  representation  meant  to  some  a  real 
representation  of  the  people,  with  extensive  franchise, 
while  to  others  it  meant  only  a  representation  of  noble- 
men, being  a  logical  development  of  the  local  repre- 
sentation granted  by  Catherine  II.  The  intermediate 
opinion  demanded  two  houses :  one  for  the  representa- 
tives of  the  nobility,  and  the  other  for  the  representa- 
tives of  the  people.^  "^ 

Even  for  members  of  the  same  provincial  assembly 
it  was  not  always  easy  to  find  their  way  among  such 
differences  in  political  opinion,  just  then  in  process  of 

"  See  p.  521. 


THE  LIBERAL  IDEA  269 

formation.  No  wonder  that  to  the  minds  of  outsiders 
—  advanced  journalism  included  —  the  different  shades 
of  opinion  fully  disappeared,  and  the  liberalism  of  the 
gentry  was  convicted  of  bearing  undisguised  traits  of 
class  feeling.  To  be  sure,  the  gentry  claimed  political 
rights.  But  they  wanted  these  for  themselves,  as  a 
compensation  for  losing  their  overlord  rights  over  the 
peasants;  and  they  considered  these  rights  to  be  a 
means  for  preserving  in  the  future  their  social  position 
as  a  higher,  a  privileged  class.  Another  idea  also  cur- 
rent among  the  provincial  nobles  was  that  of  forming 
small  local  units  of  administration,  like  the  English 
vestry,  and  of  putting  at  their  head  the  noble  proprie- 
tors of  estates.  This  idea  was  also  undoubtedly  im- 
pregnated w'ith  aristocratic  feelings;  and  a  quite 
reactionary  use  was  made  of  it  later  on,  in  the  days 
of  Alexander  III.^^ 

Thus  it  was  not  altogether  without  cause  that 
the  ideas,  both  of  political  representation  and  of  the 
smaller  unit  of  local  self-government,  became  for  a 
time  "suspect"  in  the  eyes  of  Russian  democracy. 
What  the  result  of  it  was  in  carrying  out  the  "  great 
reforms"  by  democratic  "bureaucracy"  we  shall  soon 
see.  It  is  only  fair  to  add,  however,  that  those  men- 
tioned were  far  from  being  the  only  aspirations  of  the 
liberal  gentry.  In  general,  their  demands  in  the 
assemblies  of  nobility  of  1858-65  were  colored  very 
little  by  class  feeling;  on  the  contrary,  they  were  some- 
times quite  disinterested  and  rather  ideological;  i.  c, 
such  as  we  have  seen  them  to  be  in  the  previous  history 
of  Russian  liberalism.    Thus  both  in  the  St.  Petersburg 

"  See  pp.  314  ff. 


270  RUSSIA  AND  ITS  CRISIS 

and  ill  the  Moscow  assemblies  of  nobility  the  small 
groups  of  discontented  aristocrats  were  overruled  by 
the  adherents  of  a  more  advanced  liberalism ;  and 
resolutions  were  carried  to  the  effect  of  convening  the 
central  representative  assembly  of  all  the  classes,  in 
order  to  examine  into  the  desires  and  necessities  of  the 
country. 

In  some  of  the  provincial  assemblies  even  more 
radical  decisions  were  taken.  Thus  in  Smolensk  and 
in  Tver  the  nobles  had  decided  to  demand  a  constitu- 
tional form  of  government ;  and,  besides  this,  the 
Smolensk  assembly  decreed  the  abolition  of  all  the 
rights  of  the  nobility;  and  in  Tver,  by  the  over- 
whelming majority  of  113  to  22,  the  nobles  required 
the  immediate  and  obligatory  sale  of  all  the  peasant 
holdings  to  the  village  communities,  which  had  been 
considered  —  and  avoided  by  the  government  —  as  a 
radical  form  of  emancipation.  Some  assemblies  de- 
manded also  a  thorough  reform  of  taxation,  on  the 
principles  of  an  income  tax;  /.  c,  the  abolition  of  the 
most  important  privilege  which  until  then  had  dis- 
tinguished the  upper  from  the  lower  classes,  which 
latter  for  centuries  had  been  the  only  "  taxable " 
ones.  There  was  also  a  pronounced  tendency  to  abolish 
another  matter-of-fact  privilege  of  the  higher  classes 
—  the  privilege  of  being  judged  according  to  the  rules 
of  a  written  law ;  while  the  peasants  were  supposed  to 
be  in  possession  of  a  particular  "custom  law,"  which 
virtually  often  issued  in  there  being  no  law  for  them 
at  all.  That  demand,  of  course,  was  opposed  to  the  cur- 
rent doctrine  of  democratic  nationalism,  which  credited 
this  custom  law  as  a  hidden  well  of  popular  wisdom, 


THE  LIBERAL  IDEA  271 

much  hig-her  and  more  perfect  than  any  ratio  scripta  of 
the  Romans,  or  of  their  too  obsequious  pupils  in  west- 
ern Europe. 

The  clash  was  still  more  obvious  between  the  views 
of  the  democratic  nationalists  and  those  of  the  landed 
proprietors  with  reference  to  the  regime  of  the  Russian 
landed  property,  the  Mir.  The  nationalists  saw  in  this 
institution  the  germ  of  future  salvation  for  the  whole 
of  humanity,  whereas  some  of  the  landed  proprietors 
denounced  this  very  system  of  the  Mir  as  "  commun- 
istic" and  objectional)le  from  the  point  of  view  of  the 
sacred  rights  of  property.  Reason  and  class  interest 
were  so  much  intertwined  in  these  arguments  of  the 
agrarian  gentry  that  it  was  very  easy  for  the  existing 
current  social  doctrine  of  the  Russian  "  populists  "  to 
denounce  the  whole  argument  against  the  further  exist- 
ence either  of  custom  law  or  of  village  community  as 
reactionary  and  undemocratic,  and  so  to  discredit  it  for 
many  years  to  come. 

In  this  confusing  medley  of  conflicting  interests, 
clashing  arguments,  and  overlapping  divisions,  which 
were  to  have  the  upper  hand  ?  The  prevailing  opinions 
were  the  same  as  had  given  the  chief  impulse  to  the 
whole  movement  —  the  opinions  of  the  omnipotent 
"bureaucracy"  in  St.  Petersburg.  There  has  always 
been  an  omnipotent  bureaucracy  in  the  northern  capi- 
tal ;  but  rarely  has  it  had  the  privilege  of  having  a 
settled  opinion  of  its  own  on  political  and  social  ques- 
tions. Why,  then,  did  it  have  such  an  opinion  now  ? 
And  where  did  it  come  from?  We  have  seen  that  this 
opinion  was  not  that  of  the  official  chiefs,  but  rather 
of  their  orderlies  in  service,  the  only  ones  who  hap- 


272  RUSSIA  AND  ITS  CRISIS 

pened  to  have  any  opinion  just  at  the  moment  when 
some  opinion  was  necessary.     But  why  did  it  happen 
to  be  just  this  particular  kind  of  opinion?     We  have 
only  to  call  this  opinion  by  its  proper  name  —  as  we 
already  have  called  it  —  the  "democratic  nationalism," 
in  order  to  fix  it  definitely.     It  was,  as  we  have  seen, 
the  very  opinion  the  elements  of  which  were  in  pre- 
paration during  the  reign  of  Nicholas.     Such  a  states- 
man as  Millyoutin  and  such  a  journalist  as  Kavailin 
are  the  best  representatives  of  the  whole  class.     As 
long  as  the  chief  question  was  a  social  one,  and  the  best 
means  to  resolve  it  was  to  impose  a  ready-made  solu- 
tion upon  the  proprietors,  they  were  the  right  men  in 
the  right  place  —  virtually  the  only  ones  able  to  use  the 
tremendous  power  of  autocracy  for  the  aim  of  repeat- 
ing, in  a  new  and,  as  they  thought,  improved  edition, 
one  of  the  best  attempts  of  the  French  Revolution. 
But  these  men  had  their  limitations,  and  their  system 
partook  of  the  nature  of  their  drawbacks.     The  same 
power  of  autocracy  and  the  selfsame  democratic  pro- 
gram  of   peasant   emancipation    Millyoutin    conscien- 
tiously applied  to  crush  the  oppositionary  elements  in 
Poland ;  and  the  same  feeling  against  the  gentry  made 
Kavailin  proclaim  as  unripe  every  attempt  for  a  politi- 
cal representation  in  Russia. 

Men  like  Kavailin  could  not  be  mistaken  as  to  the 
real  importance  of  this  new  political  cry  for  further 
development  in  Russia.  Practically,  political  repre- 
sentation had  now  to  become  the  chief  claim  of  any 
political  opposition.  But  for  the  generation  of 
Kavailin  it  seemed  too  much  tinged  with  the  class 
aspirations  of  the  gentry.     "A  constitution,"  says  he 


THE  LIBERAL  IDEA  273 

in  one  of  his  early  pamphlets  (1861),  "that  is  what 
makes  the  subject  of  secret  dreams  and  fervent  hopes 
of  the  nobility ;  constitution  is  on  all  lips  and  in  every 
heart;  it  is  discussed  in  all  circles  —  in  capitals  and  in 
provinces;  this  is  the  pet  idea  of  the  higher  class." 
Now,  was  it  really  an  idea  of  the  higher  class  only? 
And  was  it  only  in  the  interests  of  the  higher  class  that 
the  educated  gentry  were  claiming  it?  In  order  to 
throw  more  light  on  this  question,  let  us  enter  the  pre- 
cincts of  one  of  those  assemblies  of  nobility  which  were 
at  that  time  discussing  the  question.  Let  us  choose  the 
Moscow  assembly  of  1865,  the  only  one  which  pub- 
lished accurate  minutes  of  its  proceedings. 

To  be  sure,  this  assembly  declaims,  we  find,  against 
the  "  camarila  "  of  St.  Petersburg  trampling  under  foot 
the  fundamental  laws  of  the  realm,  violating  private 
property,  and  in  the  name  of  the  Tsar  practicing  its 
dictatorial  power.  The  members  of  this  assembly  are 
so  much  more  audacious  in  their  invective  that  they 
know  —  and  dare  to  speak  it  out  loudly  —  that  these 
men  are  not  the  "  high  dignitaries ; "  rather  they  are 
"  democrats,  radicals,  socialists,  and  other  people  of  the 
same  kind,"  who  have  somehow  "  slipped  themselves 
into  administrative  spheres,  and  sometimes  even  into 
important  posts."  The  conservatives  of  the  assembly 
even  do  not  hesitate  to  denounce  this  or  that  speech  of 
their  younger  colleagues  as  "  singularly  reminding 
one  of  the  style  of  a  certain  Russian  monthly"  (the 
renowned  Sovremennik  —  "The  Contemporary" —  is 
meant,  which,  abolished  two  years  before  for  its  radi- 
calism, advocated  the  extreme  solution  of  the  emanci- 
pation problem).     At  the  same  time  the  assembly  sent 


274  RUSSIA  AND  ITS  CRISIS 

congratulations  to  Katkov,  the  nationalistic  journalist, 
for  having  exterminated  "  the  enormous  influence  of 
Herzen,"  the  renowned  political  refugee  ;^^  and  it 
made  one  with  the  government  against  the  Polish 
rebels  of  1863.  All  these  are  impressions  of  the  time, 
which  were  about  to  transform  many  a  liberal  noble- 
man of  yesterday  into  a  reactionary  of  tomorrow.^ ^ 
Now  we  must  see  what  these  men  think  about  political 
representation. 

A  motion  to  that  effect  having  been  introduced  by 
some  district  nobles,  a  vivid  discussion  was  begun. 
An  overwhelming  majority  of  the  assembly  was  in 
favor  of  a  petition  to  the  Tsar  for  a  general  repre- 
sensation  of  all  the  social  classes  of  Russia,  tO'  be 
summoned  to  a  central  deliberative  assembly.  No 
objection  arose  as  to  the  desirability  of  such  a  repre- 
sentation of  all  classes.  And  such  objections  as  were 
formulated  by  the  extreme  right  and  the  extreme  left 
wings  of  the  assembly  were  only :  first,  whether  the 
given  assembly  is  authorized  for  such  a  petition,  and 
second,  whether  the  petition  is  timely  enough.  Of 
course,  these  were  but  formal  objections;  the  real 
objection  was  that,  to  the  extreme  right  wing,  general 
representation  seemed  to  be  too  democratic  and  meant 
a  final  ruin  of  the  nobility;  while  to  the  extreme  left 
even  such  a  representation  did  not  seem  to  exclude  a 
predominant  influence  of  landed  proprietors,  and  thus 
to  guarantee  the  ascendency  of  a  real  democracy. 

This  is  why  the  first,  the  agrarian  nobles,  needed  an 
aristocratic  representation,  and  the  second,  the  demo- 

"  See  pp.  363  ff.  '*  See  next  chapter,  p.  427. 


THE  LIBERAL  IDEA  275 

crats,  wished  no  representation  at  all.  But  let  us  listen 
to  their  respective  reasons.  An  extreme  conservative 
and  agrarian,  Mr.  Bezobrazov,  said  that  he  "  agreed 
entirely  with  the  great  and  noble  idea  of  the  necessity 
of  a  representation,  emanating  from  the  whole  coun- 
try; "  and  that  he  "  would  not  consider  himself  to  be  a 
human  being,  a  Russian,  if  such  a  just  idea  could  not 
penetrate  his  whole  being."  But  he  was  afraid  that 
they,  being  themselves  only  an  assembly  of  nobility, 
had  no  right  to  speak  in  the  name  of  the  other  classes. 
What  he  would  propose,  therefore,  to  ask  from  the 
emperor  was,  first,  the  inviolability  of  the  charter  given 
to  the  Russian  nobility  by  Catherine  11.-"  and  con- 
firmed for  himself  and  for  all  his  successors  by  Alex- 
ander I. ;  and,  second,  as  a  new  safeguard  of  this  same 
charter,  a  logical  extension  from  the  local  representa- 
tion granted  in  it,  to  a  central  representation  of  the 
nobility.  Everybody  in  the  assembly  knew,  however, 
that  the  "  charter  of  nobility  "  granted  by  Catherine  II. 
had  become  waste  paper  after  the  emancipation  of  the 
peasants,  and  nobody  wished  to  defend  it.  Mr.  Bezo- 
brazov  immediately  received  a  ready  rejoinder  from 
another  speaker,  Mr.  Golohvastov,  who  was  not  at  all 
a  "democrat."  Mr.  Bezobrazov  —  en  vrai  arisfocrate 
—  had  just  affirmed  that  the  rights  of  the  nobility  were 
not  created,  but  only  confirmed,  by  the  charter  of 
Catherine  II. ;  he  certainly  was  right,  for  these  rights 
had  been  created  by  the  people,  and,  as  a  consequence, 
the  right  to  revise  them  belonged  to  the  people,  in  an 
assembly  formed  by  way  of  general  representation. 
Thus,  once  again  the  doctrine  of  "  natural  law  "  and 

'■"  See  p.   171. 


276  RUSSIA  AND  ITS  CRISIS 

the  "social  compact"  was  substituted  for  a  historical 
right.^^ 

Another  argument  in  favor  of  the  representation 
by  the  nobles  was  offered  by  the  chief  representative 
of  the  aristocracy  in  the  assembly.  Count  Orlov- 
Daveedov,  the  Anglophil.  Besides  being  an  agrarian, 
he  was  a  high  dignitary,  a  master  of  ceremonies  at  the 
imperial  court  and,  accordingly  a  "  bureaucrat."  Says 
Count  Orlov-Daveedov : 

It  is  clear  to  me  —  and  I  consider  it  quite  unavoidable  —  that 
after  the  institutions  of  local  self-government,  which  have  just 
been  introduced,  shall  have  been  sufficiently  developed,  the  isolated 
local  assemblies  will  feel  the  necessity  of  a  common  center.  There 
is  no  doubt  that  this  center,  in  form  of  a  general  assembly,  will 
one  day  come  to  exist.  But  if  there  be  only  one,  if  there  is  no 
other  assembly  to  serve  as  a  counterpoise,  then  this  general  assem- 
bly will  distill  a  spirit  so  purely  democratic  that  this  spirit  will 
burn  from  the  contact  with  the  very  air. 

The  count  went  on  proposing  to  ask  the  government, 
therefore,  that,  beside  a  first  house  representing  the 
people,  there  should  also  be  founded  a  second  house, 
to  be  formed  of  hereditary  members  of  nobility,  nomi- 
nated by  the  Tsar. 

It  is  plain,  then,  that  even  the  most  conservative 
members  of  the  nobility  were  not  averse  to  the  idea  of 
a  constitution.  For,  though  yielding  to  the  prevailing 
opinion  of  the  majority  that  representation  should 
include  all  classes,  they  merely  wished  precautions 
taken  for  a  particular  representation  of  their  own  class. 
The  objection  to  any  constitution  whatever  arose  only 
from  the  small  group  at  the  extreme  left  wing;  the 
objection  being  founded  on  their  apprehension  that 

21  See  p.  1 68. 


THE  LIBERAL  IDEA  277 

competent  and  conscientious  people  might  not  be  found 
in  due  number  adequately  to  represent  democracy. 
They  doubted  whether  the  liberalism  of  the  educated 
gentry  was  reliable  enough  for  building  a  really  demo- 
cratic representation  upon  it.  Such  reliable  elements 
as  existed,  they  thought,  were  too  much  engaged  in 
carrying  out  the  liberal  reforms  of  emancipation,  of 
justice,  and  of  local  self-government.  The  best  device, 
according  to  their  opinion,  was  first  to  concentrate  all 
efforts  on  a  realization  of  these  reforms,  and  to  give 
up  the  political  reform  until  new  assemblies,  formed 
out  of  delegates  of  all  the  orders,  the  Zemstvos,  should 
be  inaugurated  ;  for  these  new  assemblies  would  have 
a  much  better  right  and  title  to  petition  for  general 
representation  than  the  nobility,  which  just  then  was  a 
particular  object  of  suspicion  to  the  peasants. 

These  arguments,  however,  did  not  meet  the  ap- 
proval of  the  large  majority,  who  found  them  dilatory 
in  the  action  suggested,  and  even  offensive,  by  implica- 
tion, in  that  they  cast  doubt  upon  the  loyalty  and  moral 
strength  of  the  gentry.  The  bicameral  scheme  of 
Count  Orlov-Daveedovj  however,  served  as  a  means 
for  conciliation.  And  so,  after  having  stripped  the 
scheme  of  the  upper  house  of  its  hereditary  and  un- 
elective  character,  the  assembly  unanimously  accepted 
the  draft  of  a  petition  for  a  general  representation  of 
all  classes. 

The  extreme  left  wing  of  the  Moscow  assembly 
was  not  in  any  way  identical  with  the  extreme  left  of 
Russian  public  opinion.  Tliis  latter — c.  g.,  Rus- 
sian radicalism  of  that  time  —  was  becoming  revolu- 
tionary;  and  the  theory  which  found  universal  credit 


278  RUSSIA  AND  ITS  CRISIS 

among  its  adepts  was  that  it  mattered  little  or 
nothing  what  the  form  of  government  should  be,  in 
view  of  the  coming  social  revolution,  to  be  performed 
by  the  workingmen  and  the  agricultural  classes  without 
external  aid.^^  But  the  negative  argument  of  both 
groups  of  public  opinion  —  radical  and  national  demo- 
cratic—  was  the  same.  Both  were  sure  that  any  politi- 
cal reform  would  turn  to  the  profit  of  the  nobles.  And! 
it  was  this  idea  that  made  liberalism  powerless  on  the| 
point  of  political  representation. 

Yet  there  was  a  moment  when  all  shades  of  public 
opinion  appeared  to  be  unanimous  on  the  subject  of 
political  reform.  It  was  in  the  very  beginning  of  the 
sixties,  when  the  currents  of  advanced  opinion  had  not 
yet  begun  to  differentiate  among  themselves.  In  1862 
the  cry  was  for  a  constitution  —  a  cry  not  only  from 
the  provincial  gentry,  but  also  from  the  Russian  politi- 
cal refugees,  beginning  with  the  most  moderate  and 
including  the  most  radical.  Blummer  in  Berlin  and 
Prince  Dolgorooky  in  Switzerland  printed  and  dis- 
cussed various  drafts  of  a  Russian  constitution;  and 
among  the  friends  of  Herzen,  a  socialist  of  the  old 
school,  and  even  by  Bakoonin,  who  was  not  yet  fully 
conscious  of  his  anarchistic  theories,  projects  for  a 
petition  to  the  Tsar  for  a  constitution  were  in  prepara- 
tion. Bakoonin,  some  years  later,  excused  his  proposal 
to  the  Tsar  on  the  ground  that  it  was  a  diplomatic 
trick  played  for  the  purpose  of  rrjaking  clear  the  im- 
possibility of  a  peaceful  reform.  Herzen's  project,  so 
far  from  relying  on  the  educated  gentry,  was  based 

"  See  p.  398. 


THE  LIBERAL  IDEA  279 

upon  suppositions  such  as  made  a  concurrence  of  the 
gentry  neither  possible  nor  desirable.  Thus,  he  pro- 
posed to  ask  the  Tsar  to  summon  a  general  council  of 
commonalty,  elected  by  the  whole  adult  population  and 
authorized  to  determine  whatever  matters  it  should 
think  necessary,  but  especially  those  most  important  to 
the  new  radical  theory;  namely,  the  constitution  of 
property,  and  the  organization  of  local  self-govern- 
ment, beginning  with  the  primary  commune  and 
ascending  to  the  higher  units.  From  a  radical  point  of 
view,  nothing  more  was  wanted,  since  the  results  of 
this  double  vote,  as  contemplated  by  Herzen  and  his 
closest  friends,  Ogarev  and  Bakoonin,  would  establish 
a  new  form  of  social  existence  in  complete  harmony 
with  the  "spirit"  of  the  Russian  people,  which  means 
collective  property  and  a  free  federation  of  landed 
communes.^^  Accordingly,  it  was  a  demand  not  for  a 
"constitution,"  but  for  a  "constitutional  assembly"  — 
which  here  appears  for  the  first  time. 

Of  course,  no  constitution  could  possibly  be  needed 
by  men  who  had  so  much  confidence  in  the  political 
ripeness  of  the  people  as  to  think  that  merely  by  a  uni- 
versal vote  the  masses  could  formulate  their  wishes 
and  lay  the  foundation  for  a  new  order  of  things. 
Here,  however,  criticism  set  in.  Tourguenev,  the 
renowned  novelist,  wanted  Herzen  to  understand  that 
a  new  social  order  was  as  yet  anticipated  by  none  but 
men  of  the  educated  gentry,  and  that  the  "people" 
were  not  at  all  sure  to  exhibit  precisely  such  features 
of  their  own  "spirit"  as  they  were  credited  with  by 

■■'"  See  p.  311. 


28o  RUSSIA  AND  ITS  CRISIS 

their  educated  admirers.  Herzen  and  his  friends 
(Ogarev  and  Bakoonin),  says  Tourguenev, 

despise  and  trample  on  the  educated  class  in  Russia,  while  sup- 
posing that  revolutionary  or  reformatory  elements  exist  in  the 
people.  In  reality,  quite  the  opposite  is  true.  Revolution  —  in  the 
true  and  concrete  meaning  of  the  word ;  I  might  say,  in  the 
largest  meaning  —  exists  only  in  the  minority  of  the  educated 
class ;    and  this  is  quite  sufficient  for  its  triumph,  if  only  we  do 

not  extirpate  ourselves  by  our  mutual  quarrels The  role 

of  the  educated  class  in  Russia  is  to  transmit  civilization  to  the 
people,  in  order  that  they  may  themselves  hereafter  decide  what 
they  shall  accept  or  repudiate  ....  and  this  role  is  not  yet  played 
out But  you,  my  friends,  are  reasoning  just  as  the  Slavo- 
phils do :  you  use  the  German  method  of  abstraction,  and  thus  you 
deduce  from  a  dim  and  unintelligible  essence  of  the  people  such 
principles  as  you  suppose  they  will  use  to  build  their  whole  exist- 
ence upon,  and  so  you  turn  around  in  a  fog In  fact,  you 

are  brought  to  repudiate  revolution,  because  the  people  you  wor- 
ship are  conservative  par  excellence;  in  their  sheepskins,  their 
warm  and  dirty  hovels  they  foster  the  germs  of  a  bourgeoisie 
which  will  leave  the  ill-famed  western  bourgeoisie  far  behind. 
....  The  only  sure  point  of  reliance  for  an  actual  revolutionary 
propaganda  is  this  very  minority  of  the  educated  ones  whom 
Bakoonin  calls  "  rotten,"  and  "  torn  from  the  national  ground," 
and  "  guilty  of  treason  before  the  people." 

^"  This  Hterary  debate  between  two  eminent  represen- 
tative Russians  is  pregnant  with  poHtical  significance. 
It  has  been  shown  that  a  time  was  now  beginning  when 
the  former  advocacy  of  the  democratic  cause  by  Hberal 
men  of  the  gentry  had  to  give  way  to  a  more  direct 
defense  of  the  people  in  their  own  name  and  by  their 
own  representatives.  We  shall  later  on  learn  who  were 
the  men  to  claim  this  direct  defense  as  their  right  and 
duty.  But  even  now  we  can  see  that,  when  the  claim 
was  first  put  forward,  the  chief,  the  real,  claimant  was 


THE  LIBERAL  IDEA  281 

not  yet  there  to  take  up  his  cause.  The  ideal  of  an 
immediate  democracy,  to  be  realized  by  democracy's 
own  hands,  was  already  present ;  but  the  actual  condi- 
tion of  things  was  such  as  to  make  the  realization  of 
this  ideal  as  yet  impossible.  On  the  other  hand,  there 
was  an  educated  class  ready  and  greedy  for  political 
activity  for  the  sake  of  the  people;  but  this  activity  was 
in  advance  suspected  by  consistent  democrats.  Thus, 
the  only  political  action  within  the  range  of  practical 
politics  was  made  impossible  by  the  political  idealism 
of  the  Russian  "intellectuals;"  whereas  the  only  con- 
templated action,  a  popular  plebiscite  in  favor  of  a  new 
order  of  things,  was  a  Utopia.  Nevertheless,  ideas 
which  thus  clashed  in  the  minds  of  inexperienced  Rus- 
sian politicians  of  that  generation  —  ideas  of  a  consti- 
tution or  of  a  rule  by  the  people  —  were  neither  futile 
nor  childish.  Both  of  them  were  fundamental,  but  in 
Russia  the  latter  idea  followed  the  former  by  a  too 
short  interval. 

Democracy  as  an  ideal  of  the  educated  minority, 
and  democracy  as  a  real  fact  of  life,  supported  by  the 
real  class  feeling  of  the  corresponding  strata  of  society 
—  these  were  the  two  political  notions,  divided  by 
generations  of  political  experience  and  belonging  to 
different  periods  of  political  life.  In  more  advanced 
countries  the  battle  of  political  idealism  had  been  won 
first  of  all ;  its  practical  results  made  up  the  level  upon 
which  the  latter  systems  of  political  realism  began  to 
build.  Political  liberty  was  settled  when  the  social 
questions  arose.  Social  radicalism  simply  accepted  the 
results  of  a  struggle  won  by  political  radicalism,  its 
predecessor,  without  indorsing  its  theorv,  but  also  with- 


282  RUSSIA  AND  ITS  CRISIS 

out  repudiating  its  achievements.  In  Russia  alone  it 
so  happened  that  social  teachings  prepossessed  the  more 
active  spirits  at  a  time  when  the  work  of  political 
liberalism  had  yet  to  be  done;  and  the  Russian  social- 
ists, not  satisfied  to  consider  this  liberal  work  super- 
fluous, went  even  so  far  as  to  deem  it  dangerous  for 
the  people.  Indeed,  both  in  politics  and  in  social  life 
Russian  radicalism  fancied  Russia  able  to  jump  clean 
over  what  was  thought  to  be  a  transient  stage,  to  the 
highest  requirements  of  the  most  advanced  theory. 
Without  knowing  it,  in  so  doing  they  had  chosen  the 
way  of  bitter  disappointment  and  of  sad  practical 
experience. 

Of  course,  we  cannot  say  that  the  failure  of  politi- 
cal reform  in  the  "great  era"  of  Alexander  II.  was 
exclusively  due  to  this  inner  discordance  in  public 
opinion.  Public  opinion  had  not,  even  then,  its  full 
sway,  and  the  system  of  the  self-preservation  of  the 
autocracy  had  already  been  started.  To  credit  this 
system  with  being  able  to  be  brought  to  reason  by  any 
kind  of  theoretical  arguments  is  not  to  know  what  it 
really  is.  A  strong  and  united  public  opinion  might, 
however,  have  acted  on  it,  not  as  an  "opinion."  but  as 
a  force.  And  there  are  some  reasons  for  thinking  that 
as  a  force  it  really  acted  for  some  time  on  the  govern- 
ment of  Alexander  II.  Political  reform  had  been  con- 
templated, at  least  for  some  future  time.  Men  like 
Orlov-Daveedov  expressed  the  current  opinion  of  high 
official  spheres  of  that  time,  when  they  said  a  consti- 
tution was  unavoidable.  And  the  Tsar,  while  replying 
to   the   above-mentioned    petition    of    1865,    repeated 


THE  LIBERAL  IDEA  383 

such  arguments  against  political  reform  as  one  might 
have  heard  in  the  assembly  itself : 

No  single  class  is  entitled  to  speak  in  the  name  of  other 
classes;  no  individual  has  any  right  to  anticipate  the  continuous 
care  of  the  Tsar  for  Russia ;  and  what  has  already  been  done  for 
Russian  progress  must  serve  as  token  of  what  is  to  be  accom- 
plished. 

This  looked  like  a  promise  rather  than  a  refusal ;  and 
like  a  promise  still  more  positive  sounded  other  words 
of  the  Tsar,  who  just  then  was  developing  local  institu- 
tions in  Poland  and  recalling  to  life  the  diet  of  class 
representatives  in  Finland.  In  the  State  Council  this 
condition  of  public  opinion  was  being  taken  into  con- 
sideration, and  it  was  acknowledged  that  it  was  dan- 
gerous to  "give  too  little,"  and  so  to  fall  short  of  the 
public  expectation  concerning  self-government.  Every- 
body looked  at  the  self-government  of  the  Zemstvos 
as  a  kind  of  introduction  to  the  coming  "era"  of  free 
political  life. 

In  some  few  years  all  this  had  changed,  precisely  in 
the  measure  that  political  opinion  had  lost  its  unity, 
and,  from  being  oppositionary,  had  turned  nationalistic 
and  conservative,  on  the  one  hand,  and  radical  and 
revolutionary,  on  the  other.  The  year  1863  —  that 
of  the  Polish  insurrection  and  of  some  attempts  at 
popular  rising  in  Russia  ^-i  — proved  decisive.  Fa- 
cing these  events,  public  opinion  differentiated  at  a 
bound.  Instead  of  a  lot  of  scarcely  discernible  and 
very  personal  shades  of  political  opinion,  we  thence- 
forward have  to  deal  w  ith  three  fundamental  groups  of 
politically  active  men:  the  political  opinions  within  each 

"  See  pp.  380  r. 


284  RUSSIA  AND  ITS  CRISIS 

group  having  become  so  cogent  as  to  be  almost  com- 
pulsory, and  so  had  bound  up  their  members  in  a  kind 
of  political  party.  These  opinions,  expressed  through 
certain  party  organs  and  party  representatives,  obliged 
their  followers  to  a  definite  line  of  political  action.  In 
a  word,  the  year  1863  signalizes  a  new  departure  in  the 
political  history  of  Russia;  then  it  was  that  the  con- 
tinuous history  of  Russian  political  parties  now  in 
action  began. 

The  three  groups  mentioned  are  the  following: 
I.  The  conservative  group,  whose  most  active  cen- 
ter was  formed  out  of  a  few  moderate  liberals  who 
became  frightened  by  the  drift  of  events.  Some  of 
them  had  formerly  been  "European  liberals;"  e.  g., 
the  members  of  the  circle  of  Grand  Duke  Constantine ; 
and  others  were  "  nationalistic  democrats  "  of  the  type 
already  described.  For  about  a  quarter  of  a  century 
this  group  was  represented  by  their  leaders:  Ivan 
Aksakov,  for  the  nationalistic  and  democratic,  and 
Katkov  for  the  bureaucratic  and  centralistic,  faction  of 
the  party.  Though  starting  from  opposite  principles, 
these  "nationalist  democrats"  and  "nationalist  liber- 
als" ended  by  uniting  for  practical  politics;  and  even 
the  third  element,  the  remainder  of  the  party  of  noble 
"landlords,"  which  had  hated  both  the  nationalistic 
liberals  and  the  democrats,  later  on  acquiesced  in  the 
undignified  but  profitable  occupation  of  sitting  at  the 
feet  of  these  parties  and  nourishing  themselves  with 
scraps  from  their  tables,  until  better  times  should  come. 
These  times  have  really  come  for  the  ancient  nobility 
and  gentry,  during  the  reign  of  Alexander  III ;  but  it 
was  too  late  for  their  salvation. 


THE  LIBERAL  IDEA  285 

2.  On  the  wing  opposite  to  the  group  of  con- 
servatives the  revolutionary  socialistic-^  party  was 
formed,  taking  its  origin  in  Herzen's  and  Bakoonin's 
theories,  though  the  leaders  of  the  younger  generation 
soon  went  their  own  way. 

3.  The  place  of  liberalism  lay  between  the  con- 
servative and  the  revolutionary  socialistic  party.  The 
newly  founded  local  self-government,  the  Zemstvos, 
formed  its  headquarters;  and  men  of  liberal  profes- 
sions throughout  Russia,  its  active  army. 

We  already  have  seen,  in  chap,  ii,  the  change  of  the 
nationalistic  movement  to  conservative  and  reaction- 
ary. We  also  have  seen,  in  chap,  iv,  what  bureaucracy 
contributed  to  the  reactionary  program.  And  we  know 
how  the  bureaucracy  exploited  both  the  nationalistic 
aspirations  of  theorists  and  the  class  interests  of  the 
decaying  nobility  for  the  self-defense  of  autocracy.  In 
the  following  chapter  we  shall  study  Russian  socialism 
and  the  revolutionary  movement.  Here  it  remains  for 
us  to  consider  the  subsequent  history  of  the  inter- 
mediate current  —  that  of  liberalism. 

Russian  liberalism  of  this  second  period,  beginning 
,  with  the  emancipation  of  the  serfs,  was  not  merely  a 
doctrine,  it  was  also  an  actual  scheme  of  practical  poli- 
tics. It  fought  for  its  program,  not  only  by  means  of  a 
literary  propaganda,  but  by  means  of  actual  work  in 
the  newly  created  institutions  of  local  self-government. 
As  we  have  said,  liberalism  recruited  its  army  and 
organized  its  headquarters.     And  that  is  why  liberal- 

"  The  term  "  revolutionary  socialistic,"  which  now  designates 
only  one  aspect  of  Russian  socialism,  formerly  desiKnated  the  whole, 
and  its  use  can  be  traced  back  to  the  theories  and  the  terminology  of 
Bakoonin  (seep.  341;. 


286  RUSSIA  AND  ITS  CRISIS 

ism  no  longer  meant  a  more  or  less  indefinite  state  of 
public  opinion,  but  rather  a  political  group  which  soon 
became  a  political  party. 

The  composition  of  the  liberal  army  was  a  first 
manifestation  of  the  important  change  thus  character- 
ized. For  this  arm}^  was  no  longer  formed  of  the  edu- 
cated gentry  alone;  indeed,  the  educated  gentry  had 
itself  very  much  changed  in  character.  This  former 
element  of  the  liberal  party  had  become  more  demo- 
cratic; and  new  democratic  elements  joined  the  party 
from  the  lower  social  classes. 

Indeed,  the  ancient  gentry,  in  consequence  of  the 
emancipation  of  the  serfs,  had  decayed  rapidly.  The 
impoverished  scions  of  the  class,  after  the  emancipa- 
tion, had  to  make  their  living  by  personal  labor,  since 
rents  and  other  income  from  land  were  cut  off.  They 
thus  descended  to  the  level  of  the  so-called  "  men  of 
mixed  ranks,"  according  to  the  old  Muscovite  defini- 
tion. And  for  the  first  time  they  met  these  people,  not 
as  their  subordinates,  but  as  their  equals  in  the  free 
field  of  competition.  There  was  much  friction,  of 
course;  many  an  offspring  of  ancient  lineage,  thus 
falling  victim  to  the  new  order  of  things,  was  elbowed 
out  of  work  and  even  from  life  itself.  After  a  while, 
however,  this  new  mixture  of  the  social  elements  cooled 
down,  whereupon  things  came  into  a  new  state  of 
equilibrium.  And  in  the  process  of  all  this  change 
Russian  liberalism  will  be  seen  to  have  gained  exceed- 
ingly. 

New  men  of  liberal  professions  had  now  joined  its 
colors.  Nearly  all  of  these  professions  having  been 
newly  created  during  the  epoch  of  the  great  reforms. 


THE  LIBERAL  IDEA  287 

their  followers  were  entirely  independent  of  state  serv- 
ice, which  until  then  had  been  the  only  refuge  for  every 
educated  Russian  who,  unable  to  live  upon  his  own 
income,  was  obliged  to  look  around  for  subsidiary 
earnings. 

Literature  was  perhaps  the  first  of  these  liberal 
professions   to   attract   young   men,    in   the   epoch   of 
Nicholas  I.,  previous  to  the  "  great  reforms."    As  early 
as  1849-50  the  ministry  of  public  instruction  observed 
that  the  youths  from  the  gentry  overlooked  positions  in 
military  and  civil  service,  which  heretofore  they  had 
generally  filled,  and  in  preference  to  the  official  career 
took  to  writing  articles  and  editing  monthlies  and  news- 
papers.    How  largely  this  category  of  educated  liter- 
ary men  increased  with  the  new  era  may  be  inferred 
from  the  fact  that  after  the  long  period  of  sterility, 
during  the  severe  regime  of  Nicholas  I.,  hundreds  of 
new  literary  enterprises  were  permitted  to  start  in  the 
very  first  years  of  Alexander  II.    While  in  the  last  ten 
years  of  Nicholas  I.'s  reign  (1845-54)  only  six  news- 
papers and  nineteen  (for  the  most  part  special)  month- 
lies had  been  permitted,  during  the  first  ten  years  of 
Alexander   II.    (1855-64)    the  corresponding  figures 
were  sixty-six  newspapers  and  one  hundred  and  fifty- 
six  monthlies.     We  must  mention  here  that,  though 
Russia  had  possessed  in  former  decades  some  influen- 
tial monthlies,  now  for  the  first  time  in  Russian  history 
independent    and    influential    daily    newspapers    were 
established,  thus  pointing  the  moment  when,  at  least 
for  a  part  of  Russian  political  opinion,  public  exj)res- 
sion  had  become  possible.     The  three  most  important 
newspapers  were  the  Moscow  Nczvs,  the  organ  of  Kat- 


288  RUSSIA  AND  ITS  CRISIS 

kov  and  of  conservative  nationalism;  the  St.  Peters- 
burg Nezvs,  and  Golos  ("The  Voice")  —  both 
moderately  liberal. 

Another  quite  new  liberal  profession  opened  by  the 
new  reforms  of  justice  was  that  of  lawyer,  and  par- 
ticularly of  advocate  (which  in  Russia  forms  a  separate 
department  in  the  judicial  career).  It  need  scarcely  be 
pointed  out  how  large  always  and  everywhere  has  been 
the  part  that  men  of  the  law  have  played  in  politics. 

But  the  chief  resort  of  Russian  liberalism  was 
found  in  the  new  institutions  for  local  self-government 

—  the  Zemstvos,  or  provincial  and  district  assemblies 
of  deputies  elected  by  the  various  social  classes  to  take 
care  of  local  interests.  Though  the  role  of  the  lower 
social  strata  —  the  peasants  and  the  inhabitants  of  the 
towns  —  has  been  very  insignificant  in  these  assemblies, 
and  the  representatives  of  the  nobility  and  of  the  gen- 
try have  largely  prevailed,^®  yet  the  policy  of  the 
Zemstvos  has  remained  faithful  to  the  old  liberal  tra- 
ditions, and,  though  slightly  tinged  with  class  feeling 

—  particularly  in  questions  of  local  taxation  —  the 
Zemstvos  have  aimed  at  representing  the  liberal  public 
opinion  in  general.  But  the  political  importance  of 
the  Zemstvo  has  by  no  means  been  confined  to  the 
activity  of  the  members  themselves.  The  executive 
work  of  the  Zemstvos  is  done  by  a  number  of  boards 
and  offices  created  for  the  purpose  by  the  Zemstvo, 
and  administered  by  intelligent  and  educated  workers 
of  various  kinds.  Thus  a  series  of  new  liberal  voca- 
tions has  been  called  into  life,  in  which  the  liberal  ele- 
ments of  the  population  have  sought  and  found  occu- 

"  See  p.  241. 


THE  LIBERAL  IDEA  289 

pation.  This  work  for  the  Zemstvo  has  ever  since  been 
preferred  by  every  independent  man  who  did  not  like 
to  submit  to  the  red  tape  of  the  government  offices ;  by 
every  philanthropist  and  enthusiast  who  w^anted  to  serve 
Russia  according  to  his  own  ideas,  or  —  practically 
the  same  thing  —  according  to  those  of  an  advanced 
public  opinion. 

Thus  the  Zemstvos,  having  inaugurated  a  new  sys- 
tem of  popular  education,  had  at  their  service  a  numer- 
ous army  of  school-teachers.^"  To  these  must  be  added  a 
second  group,  not  so  numerous,  but  equally  enthusi- 
astic in  the  heavy  work  it  does  —  the  physicians  and 
surgeons  in  the  service  of  the  Zemstvo.  Poorly 
rewarded  and  badly  overworked,  the  Zemstvo  physi- 
cian is  generally  a  pioneer  for  the  ideas  of  hygiene  and 
sanitation  in  the  Russian  village ;  and  the  courage  and 
self-denial  with  which  he  performs  his  duty  under  most 
unfavorable  circumstances  are  unparalleled.  A  third 
large  class  of  the  Zemstvo's  army  of  intelligent 
workers  is  the  statisticians.  No  less  enthusiastic  than 
the  members  of  the  former  two  classes,  the  statisticians, 
from  the  very  nature  of  their  specialty,  keep  in  close 
touch  with  the  peasants'  everyday  life  and  know^  every- 
thing about  it.  Their  role  in  Russian  political  life  may 
be  characterized  by  the  following  fact:  In  the  year 
1887  the  governor  of  Vyatka  reported  to  the  Tsar  that 
local  statisticians  were  oppositionary  and  not  to  be 
relied  upon  by  the  officials.  The  Tsar  wrote  on  the 
margin  of  the  report :  "  Very  sad.  but  it  is  like  that 
nearly  everyw^here."  And  since  then  Mr.  Plehve  has 
forbidden  the  statisticians  to  approach  Russian  villages. 

"  Sec  p.  212. 


290  RUSSIA  AND  ITS  CRISIS 

The  fourth  class  of  the  Zemstvo  workers,  now  in  pro- 
cess of  formation,  are  the  agronomists;  their  knowl- 
edge of  and  influence  upon  the  peasant  population  are 
the  same  as  those  of  the  statisticians.  In  Russian 
political  slang,  all  these  executive  officers  of  the  Zemst- 
vos  are  known  in  an  off-hand  way  as  "the  third 
element"  (after  the  government  and  the  elective  ele- 
ments) ;  and  thus  are  characterized  a  certain  solidarity 
of  their  political  opinion  and  the  particular  part  they 
play  in  the  political  struggle. 

These  are  the  constituents  among  which  Russian 
opposition  found  ardent  adherents  —  adherents  who 
were  no  mere  abstract  theorists,  or  political  philos- 
ophers, but  men  who  dealt  with  actualities,  men  con- 
nected by  their  day's  work  with  the  lowest  classes  of 
the  population,  knowing  its  wants,  sharing  in  its  sor- 
rows, sympathizing  with  all  its  miseries.  These  men  filled 
with  red  blood  the  anemic  body  of  Russian  liberalism. 
And  at  the  same  time  they  gave  it  a  more  advanced  and 
democratic  character. 

Now  let  us  glance  at  the  machine  through  which 
all  these  accumulated  stores  of  the  new  oppositionary 
energy  were  manifested.  The  Russian  Zemstvo, 
started  as  a  local  organization  for  self-government  on  a 
pretty  large  scale,  had,  in  fact,  nothing  to  envy  in 
corresponding  European  bodies,  so  far  as  the  sphere 
of  its  competency  was  concerned.  But  there  was  a 
most  deplorable  organic  fault  in  its  fabric  which  made 
it  constitutionally  weak  in  the  performance  of  its  func- 
tions. Unhappily,  it  was  not  even  so  much  a  "  fault," 
in  the  proper  sense,  as  a  conscious  omission  by  the 
makers  of  the  Zemstvo.    This  omission  may  be  traced 


THE  LIBERAL  IDEA  291 

to  the  same  origin  as  the  faikire  of  poHtical  reform  — 
to  the  distrust  of  landed  proprietors  evinced  by  the 
"  St.  Petersburg  officials."     So  great  was  the  fear  of 
the  persistence  in  the  provinces  of  the  local  power  of 
recent  slaveholders  —  the  landlords  —  that  the  Zemst- 
vos  were  not  permitted  to  have  their  hands  free  in  their 
own  circuit.     The  link  was  purposely  left  missing  by 
which  the  Zemstvos  could  directly  communicate  with 
the  population  whose  interests  they  were  supposed  to 
represent.     No  inferior  elective  unit  was  established 
which  would  correspond  to  a  vestry,  a  parish,  or  a 
township,  with  their  local  primary  assemblies.^^     The 
Zemstvo  assembly,  with  its  executive  board  or  council, 
formed   the  only  representative   body   for  the   whole 
district  —  which  in  Russia  is  generally  an  exceedingly 
large  unit.     Aboz'c  these  district  institutions  similar 
ones  for  the  whole  pro\'ince  were  created  :  a  pro^'incial 
board  and  provincial  assembly  of  Zemstvo,  formed  out 
of  members  elected  by  district  assemblies,  to  complete 
and  to  regulate  their  local  work.     But  there  existed  in 
the  midst  of  the  population  no  commissioners  and  no 
boards   below  those  of  the   district,   which   could   be 
charged   with   the  execution  of  the  decisions  of  the 
Zemstvos.      Of   course,    both   provincial    and    district 
assemblies  were  granted  the  right  of  making  by-laws ; 
they  possessed  also  the  right  of  imposing  local  taxes. 
But  in  levying  taxes  and  in  controlling  the  application 
of  their  l)y-la\vs  they  were  entirely  dependent  upon  the 
civil  and  police  officers  of  the  central  administration. 
Thus  —  to  use  a  current  saying  —  the  new  building  of 
the  Zemstvos  was  left  "without  foundation  —  floatins" 
in  the  air." 

^  On  the  demands  for  such  a  unit,  see  pp.  269  and  310. 


292  RUSSIA  AND  ITS  CRISIS 

And  it  also  remained  "  without  the  roof,"  as  the 
saying  went.  Let  us  remember  that  pubHc  opinion  had 
very  much  changed  ^^  when  the  draft  for  self- 
government  was  being  brought  to  execution.  Thus  the 
original  ideas  predominant  at  its  foundation  had  had 
time  to  give  way  before  quite  opposite  ones.  No  more 
promises  w^ere  heard  as  to  the  "  crowning  of  the  build- 
ing "  with  the  copestone  of  central  political  representa- 
tion. There  also  was  no  more  apprehension  of  "  giving 
public  opinion  too  little."  ^^  but  some  were  very  much 
afraid  of  yielding  it  "too  much"  and  of  "tying  up  the 
hands  of  the  government."  Instead  of  thinking  of 
local  self-government  institutions  as  of  "  a  preparatory 
school  for  representative  institutions,"  others  were  very 
careful  not  to  let  them  "  form  a  state  within  the  state ;  " 
and  still  others  did  everything  to  bring  these  institu- 
tions under  the  close  control  of  local  and  central  gov- 
ernment offices  —  that  of  the  "governor"  in  the  prov- 
inces, and  of  the  minister  of  the  interior  in  St.  Peters- 
burg. 

Thus  the  new  local  representation  stood  by  itself, 
entirely  disconnected  from  the  higher  stages  of  govern- 
ment as  well  as  isolated  from  the  lower  units  of  local 
administration.  All  the  higher  offices  and  the  boards 
of  administration  having  been  built  in  quite  another 
style  —  the  autocratic  and  bureaucratic  rather  than  the 
representative  —  the  org'ans  of  local  self-government 
represented  a  sort  of  political  oasis  in  the  waste.  In 
their  isolation  they  were  exposed  to  all  the  winds  of 
the  desert.  They  were  reprimanded  and  censured  by 
the  organs  of  the  central  government ;  their  scope  was 

^'  See  p.  283.  '"  See  p.  283. 


THE  LIBERAL  IDEA  293 

now  and  then  curtailed:  their  initiative  in  this  or  that 
branch  of  local  affairs  was  called  in  question;  their 
resolutions  were  put  under  control  and  checked ;  their 
debates  were  more  than  once  stopped ;  their  petitions 
were  disregarded.  But,  in  spite  of  all  these  repressi\-e 
measures,  one  thing  always  remained  certain  :  that  the 
power  they  still  retained  they  held  from  their  electors, 
and  no  positive  orders  could  be  given  to  them  by  any 
central  authorities.  With  this  one  principle  untouched, 
they  still  formed  a  living  contradiction  to  the  general 
political  structure  of  Russia  —  and  this  by  the  mere 
fact  of  their  existence.  This,  of  course,  added  a  sting 
to  the  persecution ;  and  the  manner  of  their  treatment 
at  the  hands  of  the  distrustful  government  drove  them 
head  and  tail  into  the  camp  of  political  opposition. 

In  the  study  of  this  new  phase  of  the  history  of 
Russian  liberalism  we  are  unexpectedly  assisted  by  no 
less  an  authority  than  the  former  minister  of  finance  in 
Russia,  Mr.  Witte.  This  well-known  statesman  some 
years  ago  indorsed  an  elaborate  memoir  on  the  political 
role  of  the  Zemstvos,  written  at  his  order  by  one  of  the 
higher  officials.  The  position  Mr.  Witte  assumed  on 
the  question  was  rather  ambiguous.  He  undertook  to 
prove  that  Zemstvos  are  inconsistent  with  autocracy. 
and  that  therefore  they  must  be  annihilated.  But  while 
following  up  the  sad  story  of  that  interminable  struggle 
between  the  Zemstvos  and  the  government,  Mr.  Witte's 
mouthpiece  so  warmed  himself  up  on  behalf  of  the 
Zemstvos,  and  the  role  of  the  government  in  the 
account  of  this  persecution  appeared  so  miserable  and 
so  powerless,  that  quite  the  opposite  seems  intended  to 
be  proved ;  namely,  the  inconsistency  of  autocracy  with 


294  RUSSIA  AND  ITS  CRISIS 

the  Zemstvos ;  and  the  practical  conchision  —  the  aboH- 
tion  of  autocracy  —  was  so  obvious  that  the  pamphlet 
of  Mr.  Witte  has  been  pubHshed  by  Russian  Hberals 
abroad  and  has  served  as  the  best  means  for  propagat- 
ing nowadays  the  constitutional  idea. 

And,  indeed,  this  much  can  be  admitted  as  proved 
by  the  memoir  of  Mr.  Witte :  that  Zemstvos  and  con- 
stitutionalism in  Russia  are  inseparably  connected,  both 
by  their  fundamental  principle  of  representative  self- 
government  and  by  the  actual  role  which  the  Zemstvos 
played  in  repeatedly  demanding  of  the  government 
that  local  self-government  should  be  completed  by 
political  representation. 

We  have  seen  that  this  idea  of  "crowning  the 
building"  of  local  self-government  by  granting  a  con- 
stitution Avas  already  widely  spread  at  the  time  of  the 
very  foundation  of  the  Zemstvos.  The  Zemstvos  were 
expected  by  the  more  advanced  groups  to  take  the  ini- 
tiative in  a  movement  of  "  all  the  orders  "  for  political 
reform,  since  the  particular  "order"  of  the  nobility 
had  been  refused  the  right  to  speak  in  the  name  of 
"all  the  orders"  by  the  above-quoted  admonition  of 
the  emperor.^^  But  the  Zemstvos  have  betrayed  the 
liberal  expectations.  In  the  first  place,  their  legal  posi- 
tion was  different  from  that  of  the  assemblies  of  the 
nobles  as  far  as  the  right  of  petition  was  concerned. 
They  were  not  entitled  to  address  themselves  to  the 
emperor,  and  were  permitted  only  to  memorialize  the 
minister  of  the  interior  —  and  this  only  on  the  subject 
of  their  local  "material"  needs,  not  on  affairs  of 
general  political  importance.    To  be  sure,  in  later  times 

"^  See  p.  283. 


THE  LIBERAL  IDEA  295 

they  did  not  observe  these  legal  limitations  very 
strictly,  but  in  those  first  days  of  their  existence  they 
did  not  inaugurate  immediately  any  strong  movement 
of  political  demonstration.  The  explanation  of  the 
Zemstvos'  failure  must  be  sought,  therefore,  in  the  state 
of  public  opinion.  For  since  public  opinion  was  uncer- 
tain, and  men  of  action  were  divided  between  the 
extremes  of  conservative  nationalism  and  social  revolu- 
tion, and  since  the  constitutional  tendencies  of  moderate 
liberalism  were  repudiated  as  anti-autocratic  by  the 
former,  and  as  anti-democratic  by  the  latter,  the  Zemst- 
vos were  brought  to  silence  by  other  causes  than  the 
direct  persecution  of  the  government.  In  the  social 
class  out  of  which  the  liberal  majority  of  the  Zemstvo 
representatives  was  elected  the  opinion  set  forth  in  the 
Moscow  debates  of  1865  definitely  prevailed.  Men  like 
Millyoutin  and  Kavailin  thought,  as  we  have  seen,  that 
a  more  or  less  prolonged  period  of  modest  work  of 
local  culture  undertaken  by  the  Zemstvos  must  first 
elapse  before  the  question  of  political  representation 
could  be  raised.  In  the  meantime,  they  thought,  the 
different  classes  would  contract  a  habit  of  working 
shoulder  to  shoulder,  and  the  age-long  distrust  between 
the  lower  classes  and  the  gentry  would  be  dispelled  by 
experience  of  mutual  aid  and  local  co-operation. 

That  is  why,  after  some  few  attempts  to  formulate 
political  demands,  the  Zemstvos  having  been  sharply 
censured  by  the  government  (the  Petersburg  Zemstvo 
was  even  temporarily  dissolved),  they  held  their 
tongue.  And  so  it  came  about  that  the  expectations  of 
the  liberals  were  frustrated.  For  some  ten  years  after 
that  the  Zemstvos  did  not  renew  their  political  peti- 


296  RUSSIA  AND  ll  S  CRISIS 

lions.  They  had  their  hands  full  and  made  the  most  of 
their  time  in  that  "peaceful  work  of  improvement"  — 
an  entire  transforming  of  the  conditions  of  Hfe  in  the 
provinces.  They  founded  schools,  built  hospitals, 
helped  the  peasantry  in  every  kind  of  agricultural  im- 
provement, and  developed  domestic  industries.  They 
were  at  the  very  time  busy  in  complying  with  govern- 
mental demands  and  in  finding  material  means  for  their 
own  work;  i.  c,  in  developing  local  taxation.  But  it 
is  impossible  to  enumerate  here  how  much  has  been 
done  by  the  Zemstvos  in  their  chosen  work.  Virtually 
they  were  the  first  to  come  to  the  villages  with  mes- 
sages of  health,  sanitation,  enlightenment,  and  with 
sound  reasons  for  private  economy.  Whatever  has 
been  done  for  culture  in  the  Russian  villages  was  done 
by  the  Zemstvos  —  and  that  in  spite  of  every  sort  of 
obstruction  (which  recently  has  taken  the  form  of 
awkward  competition,  on  the  part  of  the  central  gov- 
ernment). The  results  of  all  this  work  were  so  obvious 
that  the  government  itself  was  obliged  to  recognize 
them.  The  following  table,  borrowed  from  an  official 
statement,  shows  how  much  has  been  done  for  local 
progress  in  the  provinces  where  the  Zemstvos  are  at 
work,  in  comparison  with  other  such  provinces  where 
local  self-government  has  not  yet  been  introduced. 

Thus,  under  every  heading  of  the  table  we  see  the 
Zemstvos  outbidding  by  far  the  other  —  antiquated  — 
type  of  local  government.  But  these  are  mere  figures, 
and  they  cannot  make  clear  all  the  deficiencies  of  the 
former  type  of  local  administration.  They  do  not 
show,  for  example,  how  really  poor  the  medical  help  is, 
not  only  in  quantity,  but  in  quality,  in  the  provinces 


THE  LIBERAL  IDEA 


without  the  Zemstvos:  how  inferior  the  schools;  how 
formal  and  void  of  any  enthusiasm  the  charity;  how 
lacking  in  energy  and  initiative  the  insurance  agencies 
—  and,  indeed,  practically  all  officials  of  the  govern- 
ment service  employed  in  the  provinces.  It  must  be 
borne  in  mind  also  that  this  comparison  can  be  drawn 
only  between  those  branches  of  administrative  activity 


Proportion 

in  the 

Latter  as 

Compared 

with  the 

Former 


Average  number  of  inhabitants  to  each 
physician  (appointed  by  representative 
authorities') 

Average  amount  spent  for  free  distribution 
of  medicine  in  each  province 

Average  yearly  salary  paid  to  a  village 
physician 

Average  number  of  hospitals  for  each  prov- 
ince   

Average  number  of  lunatic  asylums 

Average  number  of  paupers  and  orphans 
supported  by  public  charity 

Average  number  of  inhabitants  to  each 
(regular)  school 

Average  number  of  inhabitants  for  each 
pupil 

Average  number  of  buildings  insured  ("vol- 
untarily") against  fire 


which  are  common  to  both  types  of  local  government ; 
thus,  a  long  list  of  functions  successfully  performed  by 
the  self-governing  provinces  find  no  parallels  in  the 
institutions  of  the  provinces  existing  previous  to  the 
era  of  "  the  great  reform,"  where  no  local  representa- 
tion had  been  introduced. -^^    Such  are,  for  instance,  the 

"These  provinces  are  located  in  the  borderlands  of  Russia, 
partly  too  thinly  populated,  partly  too  much  suspected  of  "separatist  " 
tendencies.  The  material  from  which  the  table  in  the  text  was 
compiled  pn,ved  only  able  to  persuade  the  government  to  introduce 
into  these  provinces  a  sort  of  self-government  unknown  to  any  civil- 
ized country  —  the  self-go\ernment  by  the  governmental  nominees, 
enjoying,  nevertheless,  the  right  of  local  taxation. 


298  RUSSIA  AND  ITS  CRISIS 

fire  brigades  and  other  measures  for  preventing  con- 
flagrations, the  local  post-office,  and  particularly  the 
organization  of  economic  helps  to  agriculture,  trade, 
and  industry.  To  this  last  branch  of  activity  the 
Zemstvos  have  lately  devoted  much  attention :  agri- 
cultural engines  are  sold  on  credit;  new  systems  of 
crop  rotation  and  special  cultures  are  introduced ;  home 
industry  is  provided  with  raw  materials  and  the  sale  of 
its  products  insured;  Zemstvo  agronomists  and  eco- 
nomic boards  are  apportioned;  statistical  inquests  are 
organized  on  a  large  scale  and  their  results  published  in 
a  splendid  series  of  reports  unique  not  only  in  Russia. 
Tlie  central  government  could  not  help  finding  all 
such  work  useful ;  but  it  also  found  it  too  expensive. 
And,  indeed,  the  growth  of  local  taxation  in  the 
Zemstvo  provinces  was  comparatively  great,  though 
quite  insignificant  when  compared  with  the  central 
taxation.  While  in  the  older  type  of  provinces  local 
taxation  did  not  exceed  ^  per  cent,  of  the  government 
taxation,  it  increased  to  5  per  cent,  in  the  Zemstvo 
provinces.  And  if  still  other  items  of  local  taxation  are 
added,  the  whole  sum  will  not  exceed  the  moderate  fig- 
ure of  15.5  per  cent,  for  the  whole  of  Russia;  while  in 
Great  Britain  it  makes  up  38  per  cent.,  and  in  the 
United  States  41  per  cent.,  of  the  whole  taxation.  Rus- 
sia is  —  to  its  great  disadvantage,  as  we  shall  see  later 
on  —  still  the  most  centralized  state  economically  as 
well  as  politically.  To  make  clear  the  difference  in  the 
use  of  the  governmental  and  the  local  revenue  for  local 
purposes,  we  may  study  the  following  comparison 
drawn  up  by  the  Yeletz  Zemstvo : 


THE  LIBERAL  IDEA 


299 


Government  revenue,  per  inhabitant.  ..  .533  kopeks.'^ 
Zemstvo   revenue,  per   inhabitant 49.8  kopeks. 


Needs  of  the  central  state  offices . . . 
Finance  and  administrative  organs 

Police  and  justice 

Prisons 

Roads  

Post 

Sanitation  and  veterinary 

Public  instruction 


Zemstvo 

Expenditures 

per 

Inhabitant 


2-3 

2.6 
0.7 

32-3 
10.3 


Thus  in  Russia,  as  elsewhere,  the  proportion  of  the 
local  to  the  state  expense  only  reflects  the  degree  of 
attention  paid  to  the  proper  work  of  social  culture  in 
comparison  with  the  elementary  necessities  of  the  cen- 
tral government.  The  Russian  government,  neverthe- 
less, has  thrown  every  kind  of  obstacle  in  the  way  of 
this  work,  its  latest  achievement  having  been  to  limit 
the  yearly  increase  of  the  Zemstvo  expenditure  to  a 
small  percentage,  strictly  determined  by  law,  out  of  all 
proportion  to  the  growing  needs  and  extending  activity 
of  the  Zemstvos. 

In  fact,  all  this  "peaceful  work  of  civilizing"  was 
"  liberal "  work  in  its  very  essence,  and  the  Zemstvos 
could  not  help  its  being  liberal.  Nor  could  the  govern- 
ment help  finding  such  work  contrary  to  its  essential 
principle,  which  was  not  liberal.  And  thus  began  a 
conflict  which  has  since  become  continuous,  though  at 
times  it  has  been  latent,  and  only  now  and  then,  when 
circumstances  were  propitious,  has  burst  into  open 
opposition. 

In   his   memoir   quoted   above,    Mr.    Witte    fairly 

"A  kopeck  (kopayka)  is  equal  to  one-half  cent. 


300  RUSSIA  AND  ITS  CRISIS 

acknowledges  that  it  was  the  government  that  took  the 
offensive.     First,  the  right  of  controlhng  local  repre- 
sentatives by  the  organs  of  the  central  authority  was 
extended  as  far  as  possible.    Already,  according  to  the 
original  statutes  of  the  Zemstvos,  their  assemblies  were 
to  be  presided  over,  not  by  meml^ers  elected  by  these 
bodies,  but  by  the  marshals  of  the  nobility,  instituted 
by  Catherine  II.  Now,  in  1867  these  chairmen  received 
full  powers  to  stop  any  discussion,  and  even  to  close  the 
meetings,  and  they  were  made  answerable  for  not  using 
these  powers  when  necessary.    The  governors  had  also 
been  given  the  right  by  the  original  statutes  to  suspend 
temporarily  every  decision  of  the  Zemstvos;    in  1866 
they  were  further  empowered  to  refuse  their  consent 
to  any  election  or  nomination  made  by  the  assemblies, 
if    they    should    find    that    the    candidate    was    "ill- 
intentioned;"    and  in  the  year  1879  they  were  given 
the    additional    right    to    dismiss    even    such     "ill- 
intentioned"  persons  as  had  already  been  admitted  to 
serve  the  Zemstvos.     All  specialists  (such  as  teachers, 
physicians,  etc.)  in  the  Zemstvo  service  were  later  on 
subjected  to  the  particular  control  of  corresponding 
boards  and  offices  of  the  central  administration.     Fin- 
ally, the  new  statute  of  1890  gave  the  whcfle  executive 
body  of   the   assemblies,    the    Oopravas    ("boards   of 
administration"),  the  "rights"  of  civil  service,  thus 
fettering  them  also  to  its  "  duties  "  and  transforming 
elected  representatives  into  officials.     The  government 
thus  has  turned  to  its  profit  an  antiquated  theory  of 
Gneist  —  the   assimilation   of   elected   bodies   of   local 
self-government  to  governmental  institutions. 

The  Zemstvos  enjoyed  the  right  of  petitioning  the 


THE  LIBERAL  IDEA  301 

central  government  concerning  their  local  interests. 
This  right,  however,  became  particularly  suspected ; 
and  Mr.  Witte  admits  that,  for  fear  of  the  political 
character  of  such  petitions,  the  most  important  of  them 
were  often  either  left  without  answer  or  were  given  a 
plain  refusal.  Indeed,  out  of  the  whole  number  of 
2,577  petitions  sent  over  to  the  ministry  of  the  interior 
by  the  Zemstvos  in  the  period  of  1865-82,  not  less  than 
1.354  —  /.  c,  52  per  cent  —  were  formally  declined; 
not  counting  such  as  w^re  answered  in  an  evasive  way 
or  simply  left  unanswered.  It  would  be  quite  wrong  to 
suppose  that  all  these  demands  thus  left  without  satis- 
faction were  inspired  by  the  oppositionary  spirit.  By 
far  the  greater  part  of  them  did  not  exceed  the  com- 
petency of  the  Zemstvos,  for  they  represented  nothing 
more  than  a  realization  of  their  duty  to  "  have  care  for 
the  local  needs  and  advantages."  The  Zemstvos  were 
generally  requesting  the  government's  help,  or  non- 
interference, or  special  legislation,  in  regard  to  their 
economic,  financial,  educational,  and  other  functions 
mentioned  above.  The  government  generally  refused 
these  demands,  not  as  being  "illegal,"  but  as  conflict- 
ing with  the  interests  of  the  exchequer,  or  of  some 
influential  social  class ,  c.  g.,  the  large  proprietors  or 
capitalists,  protected  by  the  central  authorities.  Or,  if 
no  interest  was  to  be  protected,  the  government  usually 
neglected  to  answer,  or  alleged  some  formal  reason  for 
not  inquiring  into  the  affair  at  all.  Very  persistent 
petitioners  might  hope,  by  dint  of  repeated  requests,  to 
get  some  satisfaction,  after  from  eight  to  fifteen  years 
of  waiting.  The  more  indolent  ones  might  have  the 
moral  satisfaction  of  seeing  some  of  their  demands,  if 


302  RUSSIA  AND  ITS  CRISIS 

they  had  stated  a  very  urgent  need,  embodied  in  a  law 
a  quarter  of  a  century  later. 

The  impression  produced  on  the  Zemstvos  by  these 
bureaucratic  delays  and  heedless  refusals,  which  thus 
systematically  hold  in  check  the  whole  activity  of  the 
Zemstvos,  was  not  left  unnoticed  by  Mr.  Witte  in  his 
memoir.  Seeing  themselves  distrusted  by  the  central 
government,  restrained  in  every  way,  unable  to  bring 
into  execution  the  resolutions  of  the  Zemstvo  assem- 
blies, the  best  men  cooled  in  their  enthusiasm  for  the 
work  of  the  Zemstvos.  As  early  as  1870  Mr.  Katkov 
summed  up  the  unsatisfactory  state  of  things  as  fol- 
lows : 

The  institutions  of  the  Zemstvo  exhibit  a  sad  spectacle.  The 
lepresentatives  in  many  places  are  rendered  apathetic  toward 
their  work.  They  desist  from  seeing  in  it  any  serious  significance 
whatever,  and  begin  to  doubt  its  future.  Many  meetings  of  the 
last  session  were  conducted  in  a  slovenly  manner,  and  were 
attended  by  very  few  representatives.  Some  of  the  assemblies 
could  not  be  held  at  all,  because  the  number  of  the  members  pres- 
ent was  insufficient. 

When  the  men  most  interested  in  the  "peaceful 
work  of  culture"  went  away,  however,  there  were  two 
classes  remaining:  those  who  were  kept  by  personal 
interest  in  serving  the  Zemstvos,  and  those  others  who 
were  too  enthusiastic  and  too  conscious  of  the  political 
significance  of  the  work  done  by  the  Zemstvo  to  yield 
in  the  struggle  begun  by  the  government.  These  latter 
were  not  numerous  —  they  never  are.  But  they  were 
the  leaders ;  and  they  were  always  sure  to  be  followed 
by  the  average,  the  political  marais,  as  soon  as  circum- 
stances permitted  a  somewhat  freer  expression  of 
opinion. 


THE  LIBERAL  IDEA  303 

The  same  cause  that  brought  about  the  change  just 
mentioned  in  the  hfe  of  the  Zemstvos  also  raclicahzed 
the  most  conscious  elements  in  Russian  educated 
society ;  namely,  the  reactionary  policy  of  the  govern- 
ment in  e\-ery  department  of  public  life.  The  general 
dissatisfaction  which  had  followed  the  too  short 
"honeymoon"  of  the  "great  era"  formed  the  social 
atmosphere  in  which  the  revolutionary  movement 
ripened.  Its  first  outburst,  the  murderous  attempt  of 
Vera  Zasoolich  and  her  trial,  which  issued  in  her 
acquittal  by  the  regular  jury,  left  a  very  deep  impres- 
sion on  the  public  mind,  and  immediately  after  her 
acquittal  a  series  of  terroristic  acts  began. -"^^ 

The  government,  ill-informed  as  it  always  was, 
thought  it  could  fiixl  succor  against  the  revolutionaries 
in  the  ranks  of  educated  society.  On  August  4,  1878, 
an  appeal  was  published  in  the  Government  Messenger 
inviting  Russian  society  in  general  to  assist  the  govern- 
ment in  its  struggle  against  the  "  revolutionary  infec- 
tion." During  the  summer  of  that  year,  quite  inde- 
pendently of  that  official  appeal,  a  few  liberals  from  the 
southern  Zemstvos  entered  into  negotiations  with  the 
revolutionaries  with  a  view  to  stopping  their  acts  of 
violence.  The  liberals  proposed  to  the  revolutionaries 
to  address  a  collective  petition  to  the  government, 
asking  for  (i)  the  restitution  of  the  original  (non- 
curtailed)  statutes  for  the  Zemstvos  and  for  the  cen- 
sorship; (2)  the  abolition  of  administrative  evils  and 
of  special  courts  for  political  crimes;  and  (3)  a  general 
representation  elected  by  the  Zemstvos. 

The  southern  liberals  did  not,  however,  succeed  in 
"  See  p.  416. 


304  RUSSIA  AND  ITS  CRISIS 

converting  the  revolutionaries  to  their  moderate  scheme 
of  opposition ;  but  they  themselves  soon  got  an  oppor- 
tunity of  addressing  the  government  openly,  through 
the  intermediacy  of  the  Zemstvo  assemblies.  This 
occasion  presented  itself  after  Alexander  II.  had  re- 
newed his  appeal  to  society  in  his  November  (1878) 
speech,  at  a  general  reception  in  Moscow.  The  emperor 
said  he  "  counted  on  their  assistance  in  keeping  the  err- 
ing youth  from  that  ruinous  path  into  which  some  irre- 
sponsible people  try  to  lure  them."  Answering  this 
address,  five  provincial  Zemstvos  gave  voice  to  their 
discontent.  The  assembly  of  Cherneegov  stated  in  the 
report  of  its  committee  that  destructive  ideas  cannot  be 
overcome  by  mere  repression ;  that  the  deeper  causes  of 
their  general  spread  lie  in  the  general  state  of  educa- 
tion, in  the  lack  of  freedom  of  speech  and  of  the  press, 
and  in  the  lack  of  respect  for  the  law.  The  representatives 
of  the  Zemstvo  of  Tver  were  still  more  explicit;  after 
having  enumerated  the  same  reasons  for  discontent  — 
and  having  pointed  out  an  additional  one,  the  restric- 
tions imposed  on  the  Zemstvos  —  they  wound  up  their 
address  with  a  plain  demand  for  a  constitution : 

Caring  for  the  weal  of  the  Bulgarian  people  after  their  libera- 
tion from  the  Turkish  yoke,  the  emperor  found  it  necessary  to 
grant  this  people  true  self-government  [a  circumlocution  for 
'■  constitution,"  which  word  it  was  still  found  inopportune  to 
pronounce  aloud],  the  inviolability  of  the  rights  of  the  individual, 
the  independence  of  the  judiciary,  and  the  liberty  of  the  press. 
The  Zemstvo  of  Tver  dares  to  hope  that  the  Russian  people, 
which  bore  all  the  burden  of  the  vi'ar  with  thorough  readiness  and 
with  a  self-denying  love  for  their  Tsar,  will  be  allowed  to  enjoy 
the  same  blessings,  which  alone  can  conduct  them  along  the  path 
of  a  gradual,  peaceful,  and  legal  development. 


THE  LIBERAL  IDEA  305 

The  assembly  of  the  Kharkov  Zemstvo  also  asked  the 
Tsar  "to  give  the  Russians  what  he  gave  the  Bul- 
garians." Upon  this  condition  — "  of  organizing  society 
by  means  of  a  regular  representation"  —  they  even 
declared  themselves  ready  "  to  eradicate  the  evil  and 
definitely  to  crush  the  propaganda  undertaken  by  the 
enemies  of  the  government  and  of  society."  But  even 
such  a  readiness  did  not  induce  the  government  to 
yield.  Instead,  police  measures  were  taken  against  any 
further  spread  of  similar  declarations  and  petitions, 
and  the  voice  of  the  Zemstvos  again  was  silenced. 

Meanwhile  the  political  situation  became  more  and 
more  acute.  The  revolutionary  movement  steadily 
gained  ground.  The  advanced  liberals  from  the  Zemst- 
vos proceeded  to  organize  regularly  into  a  great  politi- 
cal party.  The  "  Southern  League,"  whose  activity  in 
1878  has  just  been  mentioned,  transferred  its  activity 
to  the  northern  pro^•inces  and  had  here  even  a  larger 
success.  It  grew  into  a  "  Society  of  the  Allied  Zemst- 
vos and  of  Self-Government,"  or.  shortly,  the  Zcuiskcc 
soyou!:e  ("Alliance").  In  1881  the  liberal  party 
founded  its  literary  organ  abroad  —  the  Free  Word  — 
whose  editor  was  Mr.  Dragomanov.  a  former  professor 
at  the  University  of  Keeyev,  "  a  man  not  only  well 
educated  and  endowed  with  large  understanding,  but 
thoroughly  civilized  and  scrupulously  conscientious." 
Thus  runs  the  official  characteristic  of  a  later  minis- 
terial inquiry  on  secret  societies,  "not  verv  dangerous." 
As  to  the  success  of  the  liberal  propaganda  among  the 
Zemstvos,  Mr.  Witte  in  his  memoir  values  it  as  follows : 

The  Zemskec  soyouzc,  having  spread  their  activity  over  all 
the    Zemstvos    of    Russia,    and    havinp;    at    their    disposal    their 


3o6  RUSSIA  AND  ITS  CRISIS 

periodical  which  was  very  successfully  smuggled  in,  soon  suc- 
ceeded in  organizing  a  certain  regular  connection  between  the 
Zemstvos  and  in  starting  a  concerted  movement  for  the  intro- 
duction of  a  constitutional  regime.  One  might  think  that  the 
activity  of  the  Alliance  did  not  even  need  any  particular  exertion, 
to  prove  itself  successful.  The  abnormal  character  of  the  mutual 
relations  between  the  government  and  the  Zemstvos  was  deeply 
resented  by  every  advanced  member  of  the  Zemstvos ;  by  the  very 
force  of  events,  they  could  not  help  striving  to  change  these  rela- 
tions, in  order  to  enter  into  immediate  touch  with  the  central 
government  and  raise  their  voice  there. 

Such  was  the  general  state  of  mind  when  the  gov- 
ernment, after  having  exhausted  its  own  resources  in 
the  struggle  with  the  revolutionary  movement,  again 
tried  the  method  of  concessions.  Mr.  Loris  Melikov 
was  given  extraordinary  powers  to  combat  the  terror- 
ists, and  he  thought  of  conciliating  liberalism  to  the 
government.  That  gave  the  Russian  liberals  a  new 
chance  to  propose  terms.  In  March,  1880,  Melikov 
received  a  memorandum  signed  by  twenty-five  of  the 
most  influential  liberals  from  Moscow  —  including  pro- 
fessors in  the  university,  leading  barristers,  well- 
known  authors,  and  representative  citizens  of  the  old 
capital.  This  was  a  summary  of  liberal  grievances  and 
desiderata.    The  memorandum  began  by  showing  that 

the  principal  reason  why  the  conflict  with  the  government  has 
taken  such  a  morbid  form  is  the  absence  in  Russia  of  any  oppor- 
tunity for  the  free  development  of  public  opinion  and  the  free 
exercise  of  public  activity.  Dissatisfaction  cannot  utter  itself 
through  the  channel  of  the  press,  since  the  press  is  closely 
restricted  in  its  comments  upon  governmental  action.  Questions 
of  the  very  first  importance  are  wholly  removed  by  censorial  pro- 
hibition from  the  field  of  newspaper  discussion,  just  when  they 
most  occupy  public  attention.^"    Another  reason  for  the  develop- 

"*  See  pp.  206,  207. 


THE  LIBERAL  IDEA  307 

nient  of  "underground"  activity  may  be  found  in  the  enforced 
silence  of  public  assemblies.  The  government  often  treats  with 
contemptuous  neglect  statements  and  petitions  from  sources  fully 
competent  to  make  them,  and  listens  unwillingly  to  the  repre- 
sentatives even  of  the  most  legitimate  interests.  There  may  be 
found  in  the  reports  of  any  provincial  administration  records  of 
innumerable  petitions  sent  by  the  assemblies  to  the  government, 
which  not  only  have  never  been  granted,  but  which  have  never 
been  even  answered.'"  The  result  is  the  creation  of  an  impression 
that  the  government  does  not  wish  to  listen  to  the  voice  of  the 
people;  that  it  will  not  tolerate  criticism,  however  just,  of  its 
mistakes  and  failures;  that  it  despises  the  opinions  of  competent 
advisers;  and  that  it  has  in  view  peculiar  objects  not  related  in 
any  way  to  the  necessities  of  the  people.  The  impossibility  of 
speaking  out  frankly  compels  people  to  keep  their  ideas  to  them- 
selves, to  cherish  and  nurse  them  in  private,  and  to  regard  com- 
placently even  illegal  methods  of  putting  them  into  practice.  Thus 
is  created  one  of  the  most  important  of  the  conditions  upon  which 
the  spread  of  sedition  depends;  namely,  the  weakening  of  the 
loyalty  of  those  who,  under  other  circumstances,  would  regard 
sedition  with  abhorrence.  Educated  society  as  a  whole,  irre- 
spective of  rank,  position,  or  opinion,  is  intensely  dissatisfied,  and 
out  of  that  dissatisfaction  arises  the  existing  agitation. 

Moreover,  society  demands  the  right  to  act.  It  is  aroused 
both  by  the  nature  of  its  own  reflections  and  by  circumstances 
of  the  time,  and  it  seeks  to  participate  in  the  life  of  the  state. 
These  strivings  the  administration  regards  with  hostility,  and 
throws  obstacles  in  its  way.  [But]  the  Russian  people  are  becom- 
ing more  and  more  impressed  with  the  conviction  that  an  empire 
so  extensive,  and  a  social  life  so  complicated,  as  ours,  cannot  be 
managed  exclusively  by  officials.  If  the  ruling  mechanism  in  its 
present  form  excludes  from  direct  participation  in  the  government 
a  majority  of  those  who  have  the  first  right  and  the  strongest 
desire  to  take  part  in  it,  then  that  meshanism  stands  in  need  of 
reformation. 

Another  demand  of  society  which  at  the  present  time  is  even 
less  satisfied  than  the  desire  for  political  activity  is  the  demand 

'°  See  p.  301. 


3o8  RUSSIA  AND  ITS  CRISIS 

for  personal  security.  The  indispensable  conditions  upon  which 
the  very  existence  of  modern  society  depends  are  free  courts, 
freedom  from  arrest  and  from  search  without  proper  precautions 
and  safeguards,  the  responsibility  of  officials  for  illegal  detention 
and  imprisonment,  and  the  due  observance  of  all  the  legal  for- 
malities of  public  and  controversial  trial.  [Meantime,]  for  the  past 
ten  years  the  police,  either  upon  a  trivial  suspicion,  or  upon  a 
false  accusation,  have  been  allowed  to  break  into  houses,  force 
their  way  into  the  sphere  of  private  life,  read  private  letters, 
throw  the  accused  into  prison,  keep  them  there  for  months,  and 
finally  to  subject  them  to  an  inquisitorial  examination  without 
even  informing  them  definitely  of  the  nature  of  the  charges  made 
against  them.  Still  more  offensive  is  the  system  of  administrative 
exile  and  banishment  without  examination  or  trial.  Hundreds, 
and  perhaps  thousands,  of  persons  annually  are  subjected  to  the 
severest  punishment  that  can  be  inflicted  upon  an  educated  man; 
namely,  banishment  from  home  and  friends,  upon  a  mere  adminis- 
trative order,  without  even  his  being  informed  how  long  his 
punishment  will  continue. 

The  discontent  which  pervades  Russian  society,  and  which  is 
the  result  of  the  mistaken  policy  of  the  government  in  dealing 
with  intei'nal  affairs,  cannot  be  removed  by  governmental  action 
alone.  [Its  cure]  requires  the  friendly  co-operation  of  all  the 
vital  forces  of  society.  The  only  way  to  extricate  the  country 
from  its  present  position  is  to  summon  an  independent  assembly 
consisting  of  the  representatives  of  the  Zemstvos,  to  give  that 
assembly  a  share  in  the  control  of  the  national  life,  and  securely 
to  guarantee  personal  rights,  freedom  of  thought,  and  freedom  of 
speech.  The  Russians  are  fit  for  free  institutions,  and  they  feel 
deep  humiliation  at  being  kept  so  long  under  guardianship.  The 
granting  of  such  institutions,  and  the  calling  together  of  a  repre- 
sentative body  to  preside  over  them,  will  give  the  nation  renewed 
strength  and  renewed  faith  in  the  government  and  in  its  own 
future. 

Unhappily,  there  was  among  the  Hberals  no  con- 
certed opinion  as  to  what  the  much-desired  "  free  insti- 
tutions "  should  be.     Indeed,  the  variance  on  this  sub- 


THE  LIBERAL  IDEA  309 

ject  was  very  great.  Conservatives,  like  Mr.  Koshelov, 
still  stuck  to  the  antiquated  Slavophil  scheme  of  reviv- 
ing the  deliberative  assemblies  of  ancient  Russia,  sum- 
moned at  irregular  intervals,  irregularly  composed, 
granted  only  a  consultative  voice,  and  discussing  only 
such  subjects  as  the  government  was  willing  to  ask 
them  about.  In  the  meaning  of  Mr.  Koshelov,  who 
was  recommending  the  Zcmskcc  Sohor  in  his  numer- 
ous pamphlets  printed  abroad,  this  institution  did  not 
progress  much  beyond  the  old  Slavophil  notion.  (Mr. 
Koshelov  was  himself  a  Slavophil,  though  he  differed 
from  his  friends  in  such  questions  of  practical  policy  as 
the  enforced  Russianization  and  the  dispossession  of 
the  noble  landed  proprietors  in  Poland.)  The  idea  of 
a  Zcmskcc  Sohor  no  longer  satisfied  even  the  most 
moderate  among  the  younger  generation  of  liberals.  A 
somewhat  more  advanced  scheme  was  discussed  in 
their  midst  —  if  we  may  judge  by  Mr.  Leroy-Beaulieu's 
articles  in  the  Revue  des  Deux  Mondes  of  that  time. 
A  certain  group  bespoke  the  possibility  of  granting  the 
representatives  a  share  in  legislative  power,  by  way  of 
introducing  them  into  the  existing  legislative  body,  the 
State  Council,  founded  by  Speransky,  the  constitu- 
tionalist minister  of  Alexander  I.-"^"  But  even  that 
second  scheme  could  have  had  only  a  passing  value,  as 
expressing  some  particular  opinion  of  a  private  circle. 
Since  the  "Alliance  of  the  Zemstvos  "  —  the  Zemskec 
Soyouze  —  was  formed,  a  third  scheme  seems  to  have 
been  adopted,  reminding  one  of  the  original  and  larger 
plan  of  Speransky.  The  political  representation  was 
to  form  the  upper  stage  of  a  four-storied  representative 

'"  See  p.  173. 


310  RUSSIA  AND  ITS  CRISIS 

organization.  Underneath,  as  foundation,  was  to  lie 
the  lowest  representative  unit  —  the  township  —  repre- 
senting all  the  classes  of  local  inhabitants;  they  were 
to  choose  representatives  for  the  district  assembly  of 
the  Zemstvo,  which  in  its  turn  —  as  is  also  the  working 
custom  now  —  would  send  its  delegates  to  the  pro- 
vincial assemblies;  only,  these  latter,  in  this  case, 
would  represent  larger  territorial  units  than  at  present ; 
they  would  correspond  rather  to  the  provincial  assem- 
blies of  ancient  France,  than  to  the  existing  Zemstvo 
assemblies  in  the  departments  (or  "governments"). 
By  this  representation  of  larger  territories  there  would 
be  secured  the  decentralization  and  the  local  autonomy 
of  the  conquered  borderlands  of  Russia,  as  well  as  that 
of  different  component  parts  of  Russia  proper. 

We  m-ay  trace  this  idea  of  —  more  or  less  politically 
independent — provincial  assemblies  as  CMie  of  the  funda- 
mental features  of  a  future  Russian  constitution,  back 
to  the  Decembrists  of  1825.^^  The  project  of  Prince 
Dolgorookee,  of  i860,  also  included  this  idea  of  pro- 
vincial assemblies  in  the  scheme;  and  they  are  intro- 
duced in  the  printed  project  of  a  Russian  constitution, 
published  anonymously  by  Mr.  Stepnyak,  as  late  as 
1895.  In  the  particular  moment  of  which  we  are  speak- 
ing the  politically  independent  provincial  assemblies 
had  also  the  advantage  of  satisfying  a  prevailing  tend- 
ency of  Russian  radicals  toward  "  federalism."  Origi- 
nating in  the  purely  anarchistic  tendencies  of  the  then 
current  democrati-c  doctrine,^^  the  idea  of  "  federalism  " 

^^  Namely,    their    "  Southern    Society,"    under    the    program    of 
Pestel ;    see  p.  258. 
^^  See  pp.  279,  385. 


THE  LIBERAL  IDEA  311 

was  thereupon  extended  —  and  this  by  the  very  origi- 
nator of  anarchism,  Bakoonin"***  —  from  the  vokintary 
anarchist  associations,  the  "  communes/'  to  the  exist- 
ing larger  provincial  groups,  such  as  Poland  or  Little 
Russia.  Mr.  Dragomanov,  the  editor  of  tlie  Free 
Word,  being  himself  a  Little  Russian,  the  federalist 
formula  of  the  liberal  program  corresponded  also  to  his 
personal  convictions.  And  so,  after  having  admitted  a 
federalist  organization  of  the  provinical  assemblies,  the 
program,  consistently  enough,  was  planned  to  include 
a  topmost  form  of  representation  on  the  American 
pattern.  There  had  to  be  formed  two  chambers,  one  to 
represent  the  people,  and  the  other  to  represent  the 
federal  units. 

This,  however,  was  not  the  last  scheme  of  the  Rus- 
sian liberals,  nor  the  one  generally  agreed  upon.  We 
have  seen  how  the  Zemstvo  liberals  asked  the  govern- 
ment to  grant  Russia  the  same  institutions  as  it  had 
given  the  Bulgarians.  This  meant  by  far  the  more 
practical,  and  at  the  same  time,  the  more  democratic, 
issue :  no  "  federalism  "  and  no  second  chamber,  but 
only  one  chamber  and  a  universal  franchise.  And, 
indeed,  if  we  have  to  believe  the  ministerial  inquiry 
referred  to  above,  the  liberals  of  the  ''  Alliance "  at 
their  congress  of  1880  resolved  to  demand  as  a  condi- 
tion sine  qua  non  a  one-chamber  system  and  a  general 
vote.  There  remains  to  mention  a  fifth  scheme,  the 
most  radical  of  all,  in  that  it  took  into  consideration  the 
dislike  of  the  revolutionists  for  a  "  constitution  "  and 
flattered  their  hope  of  getting  everything  directly  from 
a  "  people's  convention."  "^^    The  plan  of  this  scheme  — 

*"  See  p.  341.  *'  See  pp.  382,  418. 


312  RUSSIA  AND  ITS  CRISIS 

which  reminds  us  of  the  scheme  of  Herzen  —  formu- 
lated in  an  article  written  for  the  Free  Word,  was 
confiscated  by  Austrian  authorities.  The  author  was 
satisfied  with  three  concessions  :  freedom  of  speech  and 
of  press,  guaranties  of  personal  rights,  and  convocation 
of  a  constitutive  convention. 

What   Mr.    Loris   Melikov,   the   "dictator   of   the 
heart,"  really  had  at  his  disposal  for  the  satisfaction  of 
all  these  expectations  and   demands  could,   however, 
not  possibly  satisfy  even  the  most  moderate  of  them, 
if  we  exclude  Mr.   Koshelov,  since  he  was  the  only 
one  who  approximately  knew  from  Mr.  Loris  Melikov 
himself,  what  had  been  his  intention.    But  Mr.  Koshe- 
lov never  thought  of  limiting  autocracy,  which,  as  a 
true  Slavophil,  he  thought  compatible  with  his  scheme 
of  popular  representation.     It  is  doubtful  whether  the 
more  statesmanlike  Melikov  really  adhered  to  the  same 
romantic  illusion  of  preserving  autocracy  under  a  con- 
stitution.   The  emperor,  however,  was  made  to  believe 
that  this  was  Melikov's  scheme  —  as  this  was  the  only 
way  to  lure  the  emperor  to  commit  himself  to  this  path 
of  concession.    Whether  the  step  that  was  intended  by 
Mr.  Melikov  was  to  be  followed  by  further  and  more 
important  steps;   and,  further,  whether  these  were  to 
follow  voluntarily  or  be  imposed  by  public  opinion  — 
these  questions  must  remain  forever  unsolved.     The 
fates,  in  fact,  spared  Melikov's  fictitious  reform  the 
chance  of  a  trial,  for  Tsar  Alexander  II.  was  killed  by 
the  revolutionaries  at  the  very  moment  when  he  had 
ordered  the  draft  of  Loris  Melikov's  reform  to  be  sub- 
mitted to  a  previous  discussion  by  the  Committee  of 
Ministers. 


THE  LIBERAL  IDEA  313 

This  unexpected  turn  has  helped  very  much  to  mag- 
nify the  enterprise  of  Mr.  :\Ielikov.  People  spoke  — as 
they  had  spoken  after  the  Decembrist  rebellion  —  about 
liberal  efforts  turned  to  naught  by  the  inadvertency  of 
the  revolutionaries ;  of  Russia  driven  back  into  reaction 
for  decades;  of  the  whole  history  upset  —  in  short, 
what  is  generally  said  on  the  occasion  of  such  extraor- 
dinary occurrences.  The  draft  of  Mr.  Melikov  was 
called  —  always  in  parentheses  —  in  a  pamphlet  which 
first  brought  to  light  some  details  about  it,  a  "  constitu- 
tion ; "  but,  in  spite  of  its  evidently  derisive  use  by  the 
editor,  the  term  found  credit  with  the  general  public. 
Mr.  Loris  Melikov  was  generally  believed  to  have  con- 
templated a  constitution  for  Russia. 

In  fact,  Loris  Melikov  intended  to  summon  the 
representatives  from  the  Zemst^•o  assemblies  and  from 
the  chief  cities  to  St.  Petersburg;  but  not  at  all  in 
order  to  ask  their  advice  about  the  needs  of  the  people, 
nor  to  speak  about  any  right  of  legislation  to  be 
granted  to  them.  They  simply  were  to  discuss,  and  to 
criticise,  some  drafts  of  laws  at  that  time  in  course  of 
preparation.  Bodies  intrusted  with  this  previous  stage 
of  preparation  were  kept  distinct  from  representative 
assemblies;  these  were  "preparatory  commissions" 
made  up  of  officials  and  persons  individually  invited  by 
the  government.  During  the  discussion  of  drafts  in 
the  deliberative  assembly,  gentlemen  of  the  preparatory 
commissions  were  to  be  present  and  to  have  a  voice  in 
voting  resolutions.  After  discussion,  projects  had  to 
go  through  the  regular  routine:  /.  c,  were  to  be  recon- 
sidered by  the  respective  minister,  to  be  jjresented  in 
his  name  and  on  his  sole  responsibility  to  the  real  legis- 


314  RUSSIA  AND  ITS  CRISIS 

lative  assembly  —  the  Council  of  State  —  in  order  here 
again  to  be  discussed,  and  only  then  converted  into 
laws.  Thus  the  role  of  the  representatives  of  the 
Zemstvos,  far  from  being  important,  was  rather  humili- 
ating; it  was  not  even  like  that  of  the  tribunate  of 
Napoleon,  which  at  least  had  been  given  the  exclusive 
privilege  of  discussion,  if  not  the  right  to  prepare  or  to 
publish  laws.  And  then,  too,  the  tribunate  was  a  stand- 
ing institution,  while  no  promise  as  to  the  continuity  of 
the  summoned  assembly  of  representatives  was  to  be 
given,  according  to  the  draft  of  Melikov.  It  was  only 
a  timid  experiment  which  could  have  been  revoked 
without  the  slightest  difficulty  by  the  government. 
Reduced  to  this,  it  did  not  even  grant  the  Zemstvos  so 
much  in  the  way  of  discussing  current  legislation  as 
had  occasionally  been  given  them  both  before  and  after 
that  project. 

After  the  death  of  Tsar  Alexander  II.,  the  project  of 
Mr.  Melikov  preserved  only  a  symptomatic  significance. 
The  looked-for  discussion  really  took  place  in  the  com- 
mittee of  ministers,  on  March  20,  1881,  after  the  new 
Tsar,  Alexander  III.,  had  personally  got  acquainted 
with  the  draft  of  Loris  —  which  he  approvingly  at- 
tested with  his  own  handwriting  on  the  margin  of  the 
paper,  "exceedingly  well  written."  The  majority  at 
the  meeting — Grand  Duke  Vladeemir,  Count  Valooyev, 
Nabokov,  Solskee,  Demetrius  Millyoutin  (brother 
to  the  one  formerly  mentioned),  Saboorov,  Abaza  — 
voted  for  the  reform.  Count  Stroganov,  Pobedonost- 
sev,  Mahkov,  Prince  Liewen,  and  Possyet  were  against 
it.  The  voice  of  Pobedonostsev,  the  former  teacher  of 
the  Tsar,  was  decisive.    After  some  few  days  of  inde- 


THE  LIBERAL  IDEA  315 

cision,  the  Tsar  invited  Pobedonostsev,  in  the  greatest 
privacy,  to  write  the  renowned  manifesto  of  April  27 
(May  11),  1881,  through  which  he  made  known  his 
determination  to  preserve  autocracy,  "  which  he  found 
necessary  and  useful  for  Russia,"  as  he  stated  it  in  his 
letter  to  Grand  Duke  Vladeemir.  That  such  words 
should  be  used  to  decide  in  such  an  innocent  case  as 
that  of  Melikov's  scheme  —  which  did  not  at  all  raise 
the  question  of  autocracy  —  may  witness  to  a  lack  of 
political  knowledge ;  but  it  also  may  characterize  what 
was  then  the  general  feeling;  namely,  that,  whatever 
the  intentions  of  the  Tsar  and  his  ministers  might  have 
been,  the  real  question  was  that  of  the  further  existence 
of  the  form  of  government  doomed  by  history.  Pobe- 
donostsev's  manifesto  solved  this  question  for  a  time : 
his  solution  meant  a  quarter  of  a  century  more  of  reac- 
tion, thousands  of  fresh  victims  to  the  political  struggle, 
one  or  two  more  generations  sacrificed,  and,  beyond  all 
that,  an  enormous  loss  of  time  for  the  cause  of  Russian 
progress,  and  enormous  complications  in  the  possible 
realization  of  the  reform.  To  balance  all  this,  the  new 
reign  was  most  anxious  to  increase  the  material  welfare 
of  the  people,  particularly  that  of  the  peasants  and 
noblemen.  But  in  reality  it  achieved  only  the  ruin  of 
the  noble  class  and  was  preparing  distress  for  the 
peasants. 

Yet  the  transition  would  have  been  too  brusque 
from  the  "dictature  of  heart"  by  Loris  Melikov,  and 
from  his  promises,  to  the  unqualified  reaction.  The 
dissatisfaction  in  society  was  as  strong  as  it  had  been 
before,  and  the  revolutionary  movement  was  by  no 
means  stifled.     Thus,   Russia  first  passed  through  a 


3i6  RUSSIA  AND  ITS  CRISIS 

period  of  transition,  under  the  rule  of  Melikov's  suc- 
cessor, Ignatyev.  Count  Ignat3'ev  did  not  renounce  at 
once  the  idea  of  a  reconciliation  with  the  Russian 
liberals.  As  a  platform  for  this  reconciliation,  a  new 
variation  of  the  old  Slavophil  political  doctrine  had  to 
serve.  That  doctrine  was  founded  on  the  contrast  of 
the  state  and  the  country  as  that  of  ''power"  and 
"opinion.""^-  The  application  v.as  obvious,  if  "state" 
were  to  mean  government,  and  "country,"  province  or 
Zemstvo.  According  to  the  old  theory,  the  power  must 
belong  to  the  state,  the  freedom  of  "  opinion  "  to  the 
country.  The  interpretation  of  the  epigoni  of  Slavo- 
philism, as  Ivan  Aksakov,  was :  autocracy  to  the  Tsar, 
self-government  to  the  provinces.  The  question  pre- 
sented itself :  Is  then  autocracy  consistent  with  the  local 
autonomy  ?  No,  it  is  not,  the  practice  of  the  Zemstvos 
answered.  It  is  not,  was  repeated  also  by  men  of 
political  science  —  and  by  those  who  wished  autonomy 
curtailed  or  abolished  in  the  interest  of  autocracy,  as 
well  as  by  such  as  looked  for  autocracy  to  be  abolished 
and  autonomy  to  be  extended  to  central  institutions. 
Mr.  Ignatyev,  however,  dissented :  Yes,  local  autonomy 
is  consistent  with  autocracy,  he  said.  Moreover,  it  is  the 
very  essence  of  autocracy  to  have  a  large  local  auton- 
omy of  "communes"  at  its  foundation.  Accordingly, 
the  circular  writings  of  the  new  ministers  spoke  a  quite 
peculiar  language.  "Bureaucracy,"  its  members' 
"negligence  in  performing  their  duties,"  their  "uncon- 
cern for  the  public  weal,"  and  even  their  "appetites  for 
public  property  "  were  severely  criticised  by  the  minis- 
ter of  the  interior.     On  the  other  hand,  "the  repre- 

*=  See  p.  s6. 


THE  LIBERAL  IDEA  317 

sentative  men  of  the  provinces '"  were  promised  a 
''  vivid  participation  in  the  work  of  reaHzing  the  views 
of  His  Majesty."^"'  Not  to  fall  short  of  these  prom- 
ises, Ignatyev  smoothed  Melikov's  project  into  a  plan 
of  calling  from  time  to  time  "  experts  '*  from  provincial 
Zemstvos  to  assist  the  government  in  preparing  drafts 
of  laws.  Of  course,  these  experts  —  the  "knowing 
men"  —  were  to  be  nominated  by  the  government 
itself,  and  no  definite  form  of  their  collaboration  with 
the  St.  Petersburg  officials  was  provided  for. 

This  measure  did  not  produce  the  expected  effect. 
On  the  contrary,  it  only  provoked  a  storm  of  indigna- 
tion in  the  Zemstvos,  whose  demands  for  a  constitution 
had  become  much  more  definite  and  peremptory  with 
the  beginning  of  the  new  reign.  No  less  than  twelve 
Zemstvo  assemblies  gave  utterance  to  a  most  positive 
and  unequivocal  disapproval  of  the  system  of  calling 
forth  the  "knowing  men,"  picked  by  the  government, 
instead  of  summoning  the  actual  representatives  of  the 
country.  Delegates  of  the  Zemstvos,  they  argued,  must 
be  duly  elected  by  the  assemblies,  not  nominated  by  the 
ministry  of  the  interior;  else  they  had  no  right  to  be 
considered  as  representing  public  opinion.  They  form 
nothing  but  a  "fictitious  representation,"  and  even 
though  they  w-ere  actually  members  of  Zemstvos,  they 
must  be  formally  forbidden  to  function  as  representa- 
tives of  anyone's  opinion  except  their  own.. 

Now  the  situation  became  clear.     Public  opinion 

"  It  recently  became  known  that  Mr.  Ignatyev,  in  greatest 
secrecy,  considered  the  project  of  summoning  a  Zemskee  Sobor — in 
the  Slavophil  meaning  of  the  word  —  and  that  even  a  date  was 
fixed  for  it,  namely  May  18,  1882;  but  the  Tsar  then  dropped  the 
scheme,  some  few  days  before  the  term. 


3i8  RUSSIA  AND  ITS  CRISIS 

was  not  to  be  lulled  to  sleep  by  small  concessions,  and 
the  government  did  not  wish  to  try  concessions  on  a 
larger  scale.  Thus  no  compromise  between  the  political 
aspirations  of  the  Zemstvos  and  what  the  government 
was  willing  to  accord  appeared  possible.  At  the  same 
time,  the  chief  reason  that  forced  the  government  to 
deal  with  public  opinion  no  longer  existed.  The  revolu- 
tionary movement  was  stifled  or  died  out  from  internal 
exhaustion. 

Then  a  reaction  set  in,  unswerving  and  undisguised. 
The  minister  Tolstoy  —  a  man  who,  intensely  hated  by 
educated   society   for   his   school   system,^'*    had   been 
obliged  to  resign  the  ministry  of  instruction  when  Loris 
Melikov's   dictatorship   had   been    started  —  was   now 
given  a  free  hand  as  minister  of  the  interior.     His  was 
the  policy  of  re-establishing  the  influence  of  the  nobility 
in    local    administration    and    self-government '^^  —  at 
variance  with  a  sort  of  instinctive  democratic  national- 
ism of  Tsar  Alexander  III.    As  to  the  Zemstvos,  Tol- 
stoy acted  toward  them  much  more  as  a  personal  enemy 
—  one  of  the  Zemstvos  having  had  the  courage  to 
refuse   him    the    honor    of   membership  —  than    as    a 
statesman.     He  resolved  to  annihilate  entirely  provin- 
vial    self-government,    by   means   of   substituting   the 
governor's  boards  for  elective  administrative  ofifices  of 
the  Zemstvos.     The  annual  assemblies  of  representa- 
tives in  each  province  had  to  be  preserved,  but  in  Tol- 
stoy's draft  they  were  given  only  a  consultative  voice : 
none  of  their  decrees  were  to  be  executed  until  they 
had  been  approved  by  the  minister  or  by  the  governor 
of  the  province.     This  measure,  however,   was  con- 

"  See  pp.  216,  217.  ^  See  p.  239. 


THE  LIBERAL  IDEA  3ig 

sidered  as  too  reactionary  even  in  high  official  spheres ; 
and  so  it  was  only  in  a  much  modified  form,  as  a  half- 
measure,  that  the  original  draft  of  Tolstoy  after  his 
death  was  carried  into  execution.^*' 

Russian  liberalism  as  a  political  force  was  entirely 
paralyzed  after  the  revolutionary  movement  had  come 
to  an  end,  in  the  middle  of  the  eighties.  The  only 
refuge  of  liberalism  was  now  the  press;  but  only 
nationalistic  organs,  such  as  Ivan  Aksakov's  Russ  or 
Katkov's  Moscozi'  Nczus,  were  permitted  to  speak  com- 
paratively freely ;  all  other  periodicals  were  submitted 
to  the  regime  of  censure.  Already  in  1882  the  chron- 
icler of  the  best  liberal  periodical,  Vestnik  Ycvropce 
("The  European  Messenger"),  compared  the  monop- 
oly of  the  nationalistic  press  with  the  position  of  that 
elector  in  Scotland,  before  the  reform  of  1832,  who 
alone  came  to  the  poll,  proposed  himself  as  a  candidate, 
seconded  his  proposal,  gave  his  vote  for  himself,  and 
proclaimed  himself  to  be  duly  elected.  Under  such 
conditions,  tamed  and  muzzled  by  the  government,  the 
oppositionary  press  was  unable  to  give  adequate  expres- 
sion to  public  opinion  and  represented  no  political  force. 
Universities,  under  the  new  statute  inspired  by  Tolstoy 
and  carried  into  execution  in  1884,  were  deprived  of 
their  autonomy  and,  later  on,  purged  of  the  slightest 
tinge  of  the  liberal  spirit.  Learned  and  philanthropic 
societies  were  strictly  watched,  and  at  the  first  signs  of 
political  revival  in  the  nineties  the  most  active  among 
them  were  suspended  or  closed  altogether.  Thus  the 
social  atmosphere  became  very  close  during  the  whole 

'"See  p.  243,  the  statute  of  1890. 


320  RUSSIA  AND  ITS  CRISIS 

decade  beginning  with  1881 — the  year  of  the  murder 
of  Alexander  II. 

w-      That  was   also   the   moment  when   the   surviving 
revolutionaries   began   to    revise   their    doctrines   and 
formally  to  repudiate  their  former  illusions,  already 
much  shaken  in  the  process  of  struggle.    The  meaning 
of  that  change,  as  we  shall  see  later  on,  was  to  draw 
them  nearer  to  the  idea  of  political  reform.     They  had 
already  come  so  far  as  to  acknowledge  that  political 
reform  was  a  previous  step,  necessary  to  any  further 
activity:   the  famous  address  of  the  Executive  Com- 
mittee to  Alexander  III.,  some  few  days  after  March  i, 
1 88 1,  proposed  the  free  election  of  a  constitutional  con- 
vention—  in   the   sense   of   Herzen  —  as   a   basis    for 
reconciliation.     Now  they  began  better  to  understand 
the  part  of  illusion  in  this  very  idea  of  a  constitutional 
convention,  and  to  see  that  the  people  were  not  ready 
to  vote  as  they  wished.     The  leaders  of  two  oppo- 
site currents    (the   "  Socialistic   Democrats "   and   the 
"Socialistic     Revolutionaries"  —  see     the     following 
chapter)  were  ready  to  admit,  the  one,  that  the  people 
must  first  be  prepared   before   the   social    revolution 
might  be  started;  the  other,  that  meanwhile  the  work 
of  the  educated  class  remained  necessary  and  was  to  be 
resorted  to  more  systematically.     Let  us  quote  a  few 
passages  from  an  article  written  in  1890  by  Stepnyak, 
the    well-known    author    of    many    works  on  Russia 
published  in  English,  and  one  of  the  most  prominent 
terrorists  of  the  seventies.    These  passages  will  remind 
the  reader  of  the  observations  of  Mr.   Tourguenev, 
quoted  above.^^     Says  Mr.  Stepnyak : 

"  See  p.  280. 


THE  LIBERAL  IDEA  321 

The  question  of  how  to  unite  the  scattered  members  of  the 
Russian  opposition  remains  the  question  of  the  day.  We  may 
even  say  that  it  is  more  pressing  than  ever  before.  There  is  not 
at  this  moment  a  single  section  among  the  Russian  revolutionists 
which  seriously  looks  to  the  peasantry  for  support  —  that  is, 
which  really  works  to  obtain  partisans  among  them.  Up  to  now 
our  movement  is  exclusively  an  urban  one,  depending  upon  cer- 
tain elements   of  the  town  population  —  partly  on  the  working 

classes,  but  chiefly  upon  the  educated  classes   in  general 

To  see  in  [the  workingmen  in  the  cities]  the  chief  lever  by  means 
of  which  the  autocracy  is  to  be  overthrown  is  to  lose  sight,  while 
looking  at  theories,  of  the  real  state  of  things  in  Russia.  At 
present  this  class  can  be  nothing  more  than  a  help  to  the  revolu- 
tionary movement.     The  principal  support,  without  any  question, 

is    the   educated   class The    educated    class    has    given    us 

Shellyabov,  Kibalchich  and  Perovskaya  [see,  on  these  names,  the 
next  chapter],  and  many  others,  and  will  always  give  successors 
to  them  and  continuers  of  their  work,  because  it  is  the  heart  of 
the  nation,  which  feels  more  intensely  than  any  other  class  the 
nation's  wrongs  and  sufferings,  and  more  passionately  believes  in 
its  bright  and  glorious  future.  Moreover,  this  same  educated 
class  occupies  all  the  high  posts,  and  fulfils  all  the  most  important 
social  functions.     It  manages  the  press,  sits  in  the  Zemstvos  and 

municipal  councils,  and  holds  the  university  professorships 

We  ought  long  ago  to  have  given  up  the  habit,  borrowed  from 
western  Europe,  of  confusing  liberalism  with  narrow  bourgeois 
class  interest.     Ours  is  not  a  class  opposition,  but  an  intellectual 

opposition The  majority  of  them  are  advocates  of  most 

radical  economic  reforms,  and  a  large  number  sympathizes,   in 

essentials,    with    socialism We    all    understand   quite   well 

that,  in  contemporary  Russia,  political  liberty  can  be  obtained 
only  in  the  form  of  a  constitutional  monarchy.  And  yet  we  still 
continue  to  look  upon  the  word  "  constitution "  as  something 
unclean.  We  carefully  avoid  the  use  of  it,  employing  various 
roundabout  methods  of  speech,  for  fear  people  should  "  confuse 
us "  with  the  constitutionalists.  We  are  not  contemplating  any 
formal  or  organic  unification  [with  liberals]  ....  [but]  we 
acknowledge  without  equivocation  that,  as  regards  the  political 


2,22  RUSSIA  AND  ITS  CRISIS 

question,  which  for  us  is  the  question  of  the  day,  our  program  is 

precisely  that  of  the  advanced  section  of  Russian  Hberals 

To  hope  that,  in  a  moment,  and  by  one  blow,  we  can  win  for  our- 
selves as  much  liberty  as  is  enjoyed  by  the  English  and  Americans, 
would  be  too  naive.  There  is  far  more  reason  to  suppose  that  our 
first  portion  of  liberty  will  be  a  much  smaller  one,  and  that  it  will 
become  widened  later  on  by  the  common  efforts  of  all  progressive 

parties In  politics   we   are   revolutionists,   recognizing  not 

only   popular   insurrection,   but   military   plots,   nocturnal    attacks 

upon  the  palace,  bombs  and  dynamite But  as   regards  the 

introduction  of  socialism  into  life,  we  are  evolutionists.  We 
utterly  disbelieve  in  the  possibility  of  reconstructing  the  economic 
order  of  things  by  means  of  a  burst  of  revolutionary  inspiration. 
The  violent  actions  to  which  we  now  have  recourse  are 
purely  temporary  measures,  which  will  give  place  to  peaceful, 
intellectual  work  as  soon  as  popular  representation  is  substituted 

for  the  present  despotism If  we  look  at  the  West,  we  see 

clearly  to  what  brilliant  results  our  comrades  have  attained  by 
using  those  weapons  of  propaganda  and  agitation  which  consti- 
tutional freedom  has  placed  in  their'  hands.  In  proportion  as  the 
results  obtained  are  more  precious,  as  the  moment  comes  nearer 
when  the  party  may  expect  to  be  called  to  the  practical  realization 
of  its  ideals,  the  complications  and  difficulties  of  the  gigantic  task 
become  more  evident,  and  the  rhetoric  of  blood  and  violence 
inherited  from  political  revolutions  is  more  decisively  abandoned. 
The  German  Socialist  party,  which  has  astonished  the  world  with 
its  titanic  growth,  presents  the  most  brilliant  example  of  political 
discretion  and  self-control. 

We  do  not  say  that  this  is  the  generally  accepted 
view  of  the  Russian  socialists  for  all  times  past  and 
future.  But  we  shall  scarcely  be  contradicted  if  we 
emphasize  that  this  disposition  of  mind  was  typical  of 
the  moment  and  common  to  all  shades  of  socialistic 
opinion  —  Mr.  Stepnyak  as  well  as  Mr.  Plehanov,  the 
"populists"  as  well  as  the  "Democratic  Socialists" 
(see  also  p.  428).  If  Russian  statesmen  pretended  to  be 


THE  LIBERAL  IDEA  323 

hindered  in  their  work  of  reform  by  revolutionary 
agitation,  at  that  particular  period  (the  second  half  of 
the  "eighties")  this  excuse  did  not  exist.  Then,  if 
ever,  the  reform  on  a  larger  scale  might  have  been 
tried.  But  the  official  illusions  of  the  government 
proved  to  be  more  tenacious  against  the  "  logic  of  life  " 
than  even  the  Utopias  of  our  early  socialists.  If  Mr. 
Stepnyak  has  succeeded  in  casting  "  the  old  bones  of 
dogmatism"  out  of  the  living  body  of  socialism,  the 
body  of  official  nationalism  was  not  even  a  living  body  : 
its  doctrine  and  policy  were,  indeed,  a  "  leaden  coffin 
lid  "  pressing  suffocatingly  upon  the  living  forces  of 
the  nation,  but  to  be  removed  sooner  or  later  —  if  not 
by  reason  —  then  by  some  elemental  force. 

Thus  one  more  chance  to  begin  a  conciliatory 
policy  was  lost  with  the  decade  1881-90.  The  article 
of  Stepnyak,  quoted  above,  shows  us  the  ebbing  tide  of 
the  Russian  revolutionary  movement  at  its  lowest  level ; 
and  the  new  flood  immediately  followed.  Some  few 
months  afterward  the  author  added  a  postscript  to  his 
article,  under  a  particular  and  very  optimistic  title: 
"  The  Beginning  of  the  End."  Here  he  already  strikes 
a  quite  different  note.  What  has  happened  meantime  ? 
The  author  answers :  "  During  this  period  [of  half  a 
year]  autocracy  has  received  a  blow  from  which  it  can- 
not recover,  and  which  may  possibly  shake  it  to  its  very 
foundations.  We  speak  of  the  terrible  famine  which 
has  fallen  upon  almost  the  whole  of  corn-growing 
Russia." 

One  of  the  .saddest  results  of  the  abnormal  condi- 
tions of  Russian  political  life  is  that  public  disasters 
are  needed  to  bring  about  periods  of  political  revival. 


324  RUSSIA  AND  ITS  CRISIS 

The  Crimean  defeat  we  have  mentioned  as  the  signal 
of  the  era  "of  the  great  reforms"  of  Alexander  II. 
The  famine  of  1891  started  a  movement  —  Stepnyak's 
foresight  was  clear  and  true  —  which  has  not  yet 
ceased,  though  it  has  not  found  a  satisfactory  issue. 
No  wonder,  then,  that  Russian  patriots  sometimes  are 
brought  so  far  as  to  look  forward  to  some  fresh  dis- 
aster to  rescue  Russia  from  the  deadlock  in  which  she 
now  is.'*^  One  can  imagine  how  great  the  political 
tension  must  be  in  order  that  this  mode  of  thinking, 
which  seems  so  utterly  unpatriotic,  may  serve  as  a 
distinctive  feature  of  the  highest  patriotism  in  Russia. 

The  fresh  political  current  did  not,  however,  origin- 
ate in  the  middle  classes,  as  did  liberalism.  It  came 
from  below  —  and  so  far  the  discussion  of  it  belongs  to 
the  following  chapters.  But  it  also  influenced  Rus- 
sian liberalism.  It  was  again  a  revolutionary  move- 
ment which  awakened  the  political  activity  of  the 
liberals,  and  at  the  same  time  made  the  Russian  govern- 
ment more  or  less  attentive  to  their  demands. 

The  beginnings  of  the  new  movement  were  very 
modest ;  still  they  could  not  remain  unnoticed  by  atten- 
tive observers  of  Russian  life,  the  Russian  police 
included.  A  quotation  or  two  from  a  secret  message 
by  the  minister  of  the  interior,  Mr.  Doornovo,  to  Mr. 
Delyanov,  the  minister  of  public  instruction  (1895), 
will  show  the  initial  character  of  the  movement: 

Among  the  social  phenomena  which  came  to  the  front  during 
the  past  year,  the  tendency  to  raise  the  level  of  popular  education 
by  means  of  organizing  popular  lectures,  libraries,  reading-rooms 

*'  These  lines  were  written  before  the  Russo-Japanese  war  began  ; 
I  leave  them  as  they  were  written. 


THE  LIBERAL  IDEA  3^5 

for,  and  free  distribution  of,  scientific,  moral,  and  literary  publica- 
tions  among   the    factory   and    rural    population,    which    was    so 

strikingly  manifested,  must  be  specially  pointed  out While 

the  libraries  and  reading-rooms  are,  though  not  under  sufficient, 
yet  still  under  some,  control,  the  free  distribution  of  books  escapes 
any  governmental  oversight.  Still  more  must  it  be  noticed  that 
the  distributers  of  these  books  are  intelligent  young  people  of  both 
sexes,  very  often  still  pursuing  their  studies,  who  penetrate  into 
the  midst  of  the  people  m  the  capacity  of  teachers,  statistical 
agents,  organizers  of  soup  kitchens,  and  the  like.  The  failure  of 
the  crops  in  1891,  and  the  cholera  in  1892-3,  caused  an  exception- 
ally large  influx  of  educated  young  people  into  the  villages,  and  as 
a  result  they  have  revived  the  tendency  of  Russian  youth  to  raise 
the  level  of  education  of  the  lower  classes  —  a  tendency  which  had 

been  somewhat   slackened   during  the   eighties It   appears 

probable  that  the  above-mentioned  movement,  which  was  called 

into  being  by  the  popular  calamities  of  the  last  two  years 

will  develop  systematically  in  a  way  which  will  not  be  in  accord- 
ance with  the  views  of  the  government,  and  that  in  the  near 
future  it  may  lead  to  very  undesirable  results. 

The  revival  of  the  Hberal  movement  in  the  Zemst- 
vos  is  chiefly  due  to  another  event  which  happened  a 
little  later;  namely,  the  death  of  Alexander  III.  in 
1894.  The  hope  awoke  at  once  that  the  "  leaden  coffin 
lid"  might  be  lifted,  and  the  Zemstvos  used  the  first 
opportunity  for  addressing  to  the  new  Tsar  their  for- 
mer demands.  These  addresses  were  very  humble  in 
tone  and  most  moderate  in  their  contents  —  much 
humbler  and  much  more  moderate  than  those  of  1879- 
81.  The  boldest  wishes  the  Zemstvos  dared  to  articu- 
late were  that  the  voice  of  the  Zemstvos  might  be  heard 
by  the  throne,  and  that  the  law,  as  an  expression  of  the 
imperial  will,  might  not  be  violated  or  made  dependent 
on  the  good-will  of  local  executives ;  that  the  curtailed 
rights  of  the  local  representation  should  be  respected 


326  RUSSIA  AND  ITS  CRISIS 

by  the  government  officers ;  that  more  freedom  should 
be  given  to  the  Zemstvos  in  treating  questions  of  popu- 
lar education.  No  hints  were  made  as  to  the  limitation 
of  autocracy.  How  moderate  w^ere  not  only  the  words 
of  the  addresses,  but  even  the  intentions  of  the  people 
who  vvcre  sending  them,  may  be  seen  from  an  "under- 
ground "  pamphlet  wn-itten  to  develop  and  systematize 
the  ideas  of  the  addresses,  and  evidently  compiled  by 
one  of  the  Zemstvo  members.  This  author,  Mr.  S. 
Mirnee  —  a  nom  dc  plume  which  very  characteristic- 
ally means  "the  peaceful"  or  even  "the  tame"  —  in 
his  proposals  does  not  go  beyond  the  scheme  of  enlarg- 
ing the  composition  of  the  State  Council  by  introducing 
representatives  from  provincial  assemblies  of  the 
Zemstvos,  one  from  each,  with  rights  of  full  member- 
ship. "The  consultative  character  of  the  resolutions 
of  the  Council  may  be  preserved,"  the  author  adds, 
while  ignoring  the  fact  that  even  now  the  Council  has 
legislative  power,  though,  of  course,  not  "  compulsory  " 
for  the  Tsar. 

As  to  the  answer  of  the  ill-advised  monarch  to  these 
timid  demands,  you  may  read  it  in  the  following  letter 
to  the  London  Times: 

Whatever  doubts  may  have  been  felt  or  affected  as  to  the 
policy  of  Nicholas  II.  were  yesterday  [January  17-29,  1895] 
very  decisively  settled  by  a  particularly  clear  and  unequivocal 
announcement  from  his  own  lips.  St.  Petersburg  is  at  present 
crowded  with  delegates  from  every  part  of  the  empire  charged 
with  the  duty  of  congratulating  the  Tsar  upon  his  marriage. 
More  than  six  hundred  deputations,  each  composed  of  three  or 
four  members,  representing  the  nobility,  the  military  classes,  and 
the  Zemstvos One  hundred  and  eighty-two  of  these  deputa- 
tions were  yesterday  received  by  his  majesty,  whose  speech  upon 


THE  LIBERAL  IDEA  327 

the  occasion  is  a  model  of  vigor  and  brevity.  Advancing  a  few 
steps,  the  Tsar  pronounced  in  a  strong,  clear  voice,  and  witli  a 
remarkably  resolute  manner,  the  following  words :  "  I  am 
pleased  to  see  here  the  representatives  of  all  classes  assembled 
to  express  their  feelings  of  loyalty.  I  believe  in  the  sincerity  of 
those  sentiments  which  have  always  been  characteristic  of  every 
Russian.  But  I  am  aware  that  in  certain  meetings  of  the  Zemst- 
vos  voices  have  lately  been  raised  by  persons  carried  away  by 
absurd  illusions  ('senseless  dreams'  would  better  render  the 
original  words)  as  to  the  participation  of  the  Zemstvo  repre- 
sentatives in  matters  of  internal  government.  Let  all  know  that, 
in  devoting  all  my  strength  to  the  welfare  of  the  people,  I  intend 
to  protect  the  principle  of  autocracy  as  firmly  and  unswervingly 
as  did  my  late  and  never-to-be-forgotten  father." 

Thus  Mr.  Pobedonostsev  had  again  the  upper  hand, 
as  he  had  on  iMay  11  (April  2^),  1881.  But  the  old 
gentleman  did  not  take  into  consideration  that,  while 
the  manifesto  of  May  11  only  stated  the  accomplished 
victory  over  the  revolutionary  movement,  the  speech 
of  January  29  was  a  prelude  and  an  instigation  to  a 
new  movement  on  such  an  enlarged  scale  as  Russia  had 
never  seen  before.  The  day  after  his  speech  the  Tsar 
was  answered  by  the  liberals  in  an  "open  letter,"  as 
follows : 

You  have  told  your  mind,  and  your  words  will  be  known  to 
all  Russia,  to  all  the  civilized  world.  Until  now  nobody  knew  you ; 
since  yesterday  you  became  a  "  definite  quantity,"  and  "  senseless 
dreams "  are  no  longer  possible  on  your  account.  We  do  not 
know  whether  you  clearly  understand  the  situation  created  by 
your  "  firm  "  utterance.  But  people  who  do  not  stand  so  high 
above  and  so  far  off  from  actuality  can  easily  comprehend  what 
is  their  own  and  your  position  concerning  what  is  now  the  state 
of  things  in  Russia.  First  of  all,  you  are  imperfectly  informed. 
No  zemstvoist  has  put  the  question  as  you  put  it,  and  no  voice 
was  raised  in  any  Zemstvo  assembly  against  autocracy The 


328  RUSSIA  AND  ITS  CRISIS 

question  was  only  to  remove  the  wall  of  bureaucracy  and  court 
influences  which  separate  the  Tsar  from  Russia ;  and  these  were 
the  tendencies  which  you  in  your  inexperience  and  lack  of  knowl- 
edge ventured  to  stamp  as  "  senseless  dreams."  ....  Unhappily, 
your  unfortunate  expression  is  not  a  mere  slip  of  language,  not  an 
occasional  lapse ;  it  reflects  a  deliberate  system.  Russian  society 
realizes  very  well  that  not  an  ideal  autocrat  has  spoken  to  them 

January  29,  but  a  bureaucracy  jealous  of  its  omnipotence 

January  29  has  dispelled  that  halo  which  surrounded  your  young, 
uncertain  appearance  in  the  eyes  of  many  Russians.  You  yourself 
raised  your  hands  against  your  own  popularity.  But  not  your 
popularity  alone  is  now  at  stake.  If  autocracy  in  word  and  deed 
proclaims  itself  identical  with  the  omnipotence  of  bureaucracy,  if 
it  can  exist  only  so  long  as  society  is  voiceless,  its  cause  is  lost. 
It  digs  its  own  grave,  and  soon  or  late  —  at  any  rate,  in  a  future 
not  very  remote  —  it  will  fall  beneath  the  pressure  of  living  social 

forces The  alternative  you  put  before  the  society  is  such 

that  the  mere  fact  of  its  being  clearly  formulated  and  openly  pro- 
claimed implies  a  terrible  threat  to  autocracy.  You  challenged 
the  Zemstvos,  and  with  them  Russian  society,  and  nothing  remains 
for  them  now  but  to  choose  between  progress  and  faithfulness  to 
autocracy.  Your  speech  has  provoked  a  feeling  of  offense  and 
depression ;  but  the  living  social  forces  will  soon  recover  from 
that  feeling.  Some  of  them  will  pass  to  a  peaceful  but  systematic 
and  conscious  struggle  for  such  scope  of  action  as  is  necessary  for 
them.  Some  others  will  be  made  more  determined  to  fight  the 
detestable  regime  by  any  means.  You  first  began  the  struggle; 
and  the  struggle  will  come. 

Ten  years  have  passed  since  these  historical  words 
fell  from  the  exalted  lips  of  the  Tsar.  Russia  is  as  far 
as  possible  from  that  state  of  submissive  resignation 
which  made  it  ready  to  "  be  thankful "  for  the  slightest 
alteration  in  its  fate,  as  the  conservative  Soovorin  tried 
to  suggest  in  his  Novoy a  Vraimya  in  1894.  The  reform 
became  much  more  difficult  in  measure  as  it  became 
urgent.    The  government  has  now  to  face  positive  and 


THE  LIBERAL  IDEA  329 

peremptory  demands  of  different  political  parties,  more 
numerous,  much  better  organized,  and  making  a  com- 
mon front  against  the  government.  The  choice  of  a 
program  to  save  the  situation  is  not  easy,  and  the 
statesman  who  endeavors  to  determine  what  is  the 
minimum  program  that  would  carry  with  it  public 
approval  must  possess  extraordinary  skill  and 
authority.  ^^ 

That  this  minimum  program  has  changed  mean- 
while we  may  judge  from  the  opinions  of  such  repre- 
sentative men  as  never  would  be  counted  as  liberals  in 
former  days.  A  good  instance  is  the  lately  deceased 
Mr.  Cheecherrin,  an  eminent  lawyer  and  a  former  pro- 
fessor at  the  University  of  Moscow.  Mr.  Cheecherrin 
began  his  political  career  as  a  highly  conservative  man 
by  a  rash  rejoinder  to  Herzen.  This  was  in  1859. 
Then,  in  the  epoch  of  Loris  Melikov  (1881),  Mr. 
Cheecherrin  advocated  a  strong  repression  of  the  politi- 
cal movement  then  in  process,  and  gave  advice,  which 
nearly  coincided  with  Melikov's  project,  for  a  modest 
participation  by  the  "  experts  "  chosen  by  Zemstvos  in 
the  preparatory  work  of  legislation.  This,  he  then 
thought,  would  "for  a  long  time"  satisfy  Russian 
society,  which  is  not  ripe  for  a  real  constitution.  Now 
we  have  the  last  profession  dc  foi  by  Mr.  Cheecherrin, 
in  his  book  on  Russia  on  the  Eve  of  the  Tzventieth 
Century,  published  abroad  anonymously.  Cheecherrin 
here  holds  to  the  opinion  that 

it  is  impossible  to  limit  bureaucracy  without  limiting  the  power 

*•  These  lines  were  written  before  the  complications  of  the  winter 
of  1904-5.  No  individual  statesman  can  "save  the  situation"  now; 
the  word  belongs  to  the  representatives  of  the  people.  See  also 
chap.  vii. 


330  RUSSIA  AND  ITS  CRISIS 

whose  weapon  it  is,  or  —  as  more  often  happens  —  which  itself 
serves  as  a  weapon  in  the  hand  of  bureaucracy.  I  mean  the 
unlimited  power  of  the  monarch.  As  long  as  this  exists,  unlimited 
arbitrariness  at  the  top  will  always  generate  like  arbitrariness  in 
the  dependent  spheres.  Legal  order  can  never  be  affirmed  where 
everything  depends  on  personal  will,  and  where  every  person 
invested  with  power  may  put  himself  above  the  law,  while  shelter- 
ing himself  behind  an  imperial  order.  If  a  regime  of  legality  may 
be  said  to  form  the  most  urgent  need  of  the  Russian  society,  we 
must  conclude  that  this  need  can  be  satisfied  only  by  the  change 

of  the  unlimited  monarchy  into  a  limited It  is  necessary 

that  the  elective  assembly  should  be  invested  with  definite  rights. 
A  consultative  assembly,  whose  decisions  may  or  may  not  be  fol- 
lowed, will  always  be  swayed  by  the  ruling  bureaucracy,  though 
it  is  just  bureaucracy  that  must  be  limited.  Only  such  an  organ 
as  would  be  entirely  independent  and  possess  a  deciding  voice  in 
state  affairs  can  counterbalance  the  officials  surrounding  the 
throne.  Only  such  an  assembly,  possessing  some  rights,  can 
limit  the  will  of  the  monarch  —  which  is  the  first  condition  of  the 
legal  order.  As  long  as  the  monarch  will  not  grow  accustomed 
to  the  idea  that  his  will  is  not  almighty,  that  there  exists  a  law 
independent  of  his  will,  and  that  he  must  defer  to  it,  every  hope 
to  overrule  the  arbitrariness  of  the  officials,  every  dream  about 
"  guaranties,"  are  vain  and  futile. 

The  words  of  Cheecherrin  are  clear  and  deliberate, 
as  well  as  thoroughly  reasonable.  They  characterize 
the  prevailing  idea  and  the  minimum  program  of  the 
contemporary  liberalism.  In  the  face  of  them,  all  pre- 
vious schemes  of  forming  a  "  consultative  "  house  seem 
to  be  relegated  from  genuinely  liberal  circles  to  such 
nationalists  or  conservatives  as  have  been  converted  by 
the  general  trend  of  opinion  to  liberalism,  while  pre- 
serving their  inclination  to  compromise  with  autoc- 
racy. Among  such  new  converts  there  are  some 
"officious"  journalists,  like  Mr.   Soovorin  and  other 


THE  LIBERAL  IDEA  331 

contributors  to  his  Noz'oya  rrainiya,  or  a  third-rate 
publicist  like  Air.  Sharahpov,  who  made  his  reputation 
by  announcing  himself  as  the  successor  of  Ivan  Aksa- 
kov,  the  last  Slavophil ;  or  jNIr.  Demchinskee,  the 
famous  "weather  prophet,"  who  by  a  strange  irony 
of  fate  found  himself  to  be  private  adviser  of  the  Tsar 
in  things  political.  Curiously  enough,  to  save  autoc- 
racy, all  of  them  lay  particular  stress  on  ''  federalism," 
and,  in  order  to  avoid  the  convocation  of  a  single 
chamber  in  St.  Petersburg,  they  advise  the  forming  of 
some  eight  chambers  in  the  provinces,  thus  enlarging 
the  scheme  of  Ignatyev  by  the  above-mentioned  feature 
of  the  former  liberal  scheme.  Political  science  is 
familiar  to  no  one  of  them,  as  may  be  seen  from  their 
projects ;  they  have  instead  the  nationalistic  conviction 
that  autocracy  is  "  indissolubly  a  part  of  the  very  life 
of  the  Russian  people."  "Russia  will  not  be  Russia 
without  autocracy,"  Prince  Meshchersky  recently  said. 
Mr.  Cheecherrin,  too,  belonged  to  that  generation  of 
Hegelian  adepts  who  first  laid  the  foundation  of  this 
nationalistic  belief;  but  his  manner  of  explaining 
away  the  deep-rooted  axiom  of  nationalistic  thinking 
is  worthy  of  one  of  the  best  scholars  on  Russian  con- 
stitutional history: 

No  doubt  autocracy  has  had  a  great  historical  importance, 
with  us  even  more  so  than  with  the  western  nations.  It  has  united 
and  organized  Russia,  has  sown  the  seed  of  enhghtenment,  and 
it  ended  by  liberating  the  people  and  uplifting  social  forces.  But 
when  this  was  done  its  vocation  was  fulfilled.  For  an  unlimited 
monarchy  is  a  form  of  government  that  suits  peoples  in  their 
infancy,  not  in  their  adult  age.  When  social  forces  begin  to  move 
by  themselves,  this  form  becomes  an  obstacle.  .A-utocracy  can 
bring  the  people  up  to  a  certain  degree  of  development,  but  this 


332  RUSSIA  AND  ITS  CRISIS 

degree  is  not  high,  and  it  cannot  be  increased  with  the  aid  of 
autocracy.  And  though,  under  the  pressure  of  the  irresistible 
demands  of  life,  autocracy  may  adopt  liberal  principles,  by  this 
very  adoption  it  sows  the  seed  of  its  own  destruction. 

Thus,  any  consistent  view,  whether  held  by  an 
impartial  observer  like  Cheecherrin,  or  by  a  consistent 
liberal,  or  even  by  a  consistent  conservative,  does  not 
admit  any  compromise  on  that  particular  point.  Mr. 
Witte,  as  we  know  already,  holds  the  same  opinion  as 
Cheecherrin  in  regard  to  the  incompatibility  of  liberal 
principles  with  the  existing  regime.  Of  course,  from 
this  identical  admission  he  draws  quite  opposite  con- 
clusions. It  is  not  the  political  form,  but  the  liberal 
principles,  that  must  be  destroyed.  But  there  is  a  cer- 
tain undertone  of  pessimism  running  through  the 
memoir  of  Mr.  Witte  as  to  the  unexpressed  but 
unavoidable  question:  Which  of  the  two  is  easier  — 
eradicating  liberal  principles,  or  changing  the  old  poli- 
tical form  ?  As  soon  as  this  dilemma  is  made  clear  to 
public  opinion,  the  evolution  of  liberalism  previous  to 
the  constitutional  stage  of  political  life  must  be  con- 
sidered as  completed.  What  remains  is  not  the  theo- 
retical discussion,  but  the  struggle.  And  "  the  struggle 
has  come,"  as  the  author  of  the  open  letter  to  Nicholas 
II.  foretold.  In  casting  aside  the  liberal  elements,  the 
government  deprived  itself  of  any  chance  of  a  peaceful 
issue,  and  fostered  instead  a  widespread  revolutionary 
movement.  On  this  field  the  decisive  battles  were  now 
again  to  be  fought  and  won ;  and  as  long  as  the  gov- 
ernment hoped  to  be  the  winner,  it  always  declined  to 
listen  to  the  softer  whisperings  of  Russian  liberalism. 


THE  LIBERAL  IDEA  333 

That  is  why,  in  order  to  have  a  key  to  the  whole  posi- 
tion, we  must  make  ourselves  acquainted  with  the 
revolutionary  movement  in  Russia. 


CHAPTER   VI 

THE    SOCIALISTIC    IDEA 

We  have  now  to  consider  the  movement  known 
outside  of  Russia  under  the  nickname  of  "nihiHsm." 
This  really  was  never  its  party  title.  The  name  was 
given  to  the  movement  forty  years  ago  —  2'.  c,  before 
it  had  had  time  to  assume  definite  shape  —  by  its 
opponents,  in  order  to  characterize  its  negative  side; 
and  it  has  always  sounded  offensive  to  its  adherents. 
But  even  as  a  title  descriptive  of  the  negative  character- 
istics of  the  movement,  is  it  a  fair  name?  Even  this 
question  can  hardly  be  answered  affirmatively.  "  Nihil- 
ism "  does  designate  a  certain  aspect  of  the  early  phase 
of  the  movement  —  a  general  disposition  toward  a 
summary  negation  of  tradition  and  of  all  authority. 
This  negation  can  be  brought  into  connection  with  the 
peculiarities  of  the  Russian  mind  and  with  Russian 
history,  as  they  have  been  described  in  chap.  i.  But 
in  this  latter  meaning  "  nihilism  "  is  too  broad  a  term, 
and  is  liable  to  include  and  characterize  everything 
Russian  —  the  government  as  well  as  its  opponents; 
while  in  the  former  meaning  —  as  a  feature  of  the 
earlier  phase  of  the  movement  it  is  too  narrow  a  term 
to  cover  the  whole,  or  even  the  most  characteristic  part, 
of  the  movement.  Moreover,  at  this  time  the  term  was 
used  to  characterize  another  and  quite  opposite  activity 
of  forty  years  ago —  a  purely  individualistic  move- 
ment of  personal  "emancipation,"  which  partly  pre- 
ceded and  partly  ran  parallel  with  the  collectivist 
movement  which  we  are  going  to  describe. 

334 


THE  SOCIALISTIC  IDEA  335 

If,  then,  we  eliminate  the  local  and  transient  fea- 
tures just  mentioned,  so-called  "nihilism"  will  appear 
in  its  true  character  as  a  specifically  Russian  variety  of 
the  socialism  of  western  Europe,  without  any  exact 
counterpart  elsewhere  in  the  world.  To  be  sure,  in  its 
beginnings  this  particular  Russian  movement  had 
strong  peculiarities  in  theory,  and  it  still  remains 
unique  as  far  as  its  revolutionary  practice  is  concerned. 
But  such  peculiarities,  so  far  from  being  national  and 
"nihilistic"  only,  are  rather  due  to  the  early  period 
which  Russian  socialism  was  traversing,  and  are  not  at 
all  unfamiliar  to  the  students  of  the  international  move- 
ment of  socialism  in  its  earlier  phases.  These  particu- 
lar features  of  Russian  socialism  disappear  as  the 
movement  grows.  The  more  it  spreads  and  develops, 
the  more  cosmopolitan  it  becomes. 

But  there  is  another  feature  characteristic  of  Rus- 
sian socialism,  not  so  obvious  as,  but  much  more  impor- 
tant than,  its  "  nihilism  "  —  a  feature  which  is  not  likely 
to  be  eliminated  from  the  next  stages  of  its  develop- 
ment. Socialism  in  Russia,  more  than  anywhere  else, 
represents  democracy  in  general.  This  is  what  makes 
its  political  role  much  more  important  than  it  is  in 
countries  with  a  more  and  earlier  developed  democracy. 

When  socialism  made  its  appearance  in  these  latter 
countries,  it  found  its  field  of  activity  already  occupied 
by  a  dangerous  rival.  The  middle  class,  which  actually 
fought  the  early  battles  of  modern  democracy,  has 
imprinted  on  that  democracy  its  own  intellectual  stamp. 
Democratic  habits  of  thought  and  life  were  essentially 
individualistic,  and  thus  were  antagonistic  to  the  teach- 
ings of  socialism.    The  militant  democracy  of  the  early 


336  RUSSIA  AND  ITS  CRISIS 

days  had  considered  its  chief  enemy  to  be  the  central- 
istic  state  with  its  absohitistic  rule.    This  enemy  had  to 
be  defeated  by  means  of  the  principle  of  absolute  free- 
dom   of    individuality.      The    individual    member    of 
society    claimed    to    be    in    possession    of    inalienable 
"natural"  rights  which  no  one  but  himself  could  give 
away,  and  which  he,  as  a  matter  of  fact,  had  partly  and 
conditionally  given  away  in  order  to  found  an  asso- 
ciation of  human  individuals.  Thus  the  political  democ- 
ratism of  that  epoch  found  its  expression  in  the  theory 
of  a  voluntary  covenant  of  individuals,  a  "  social  com- 
pact," as  a  foundation  for  the  existing  state.     If  con- 
sistently developed,  this  idea  led  to  the  individualism  of 
Spencer,  or  to  the  anarchism  of  Proudhon :   the  state 
was  to  be  considered  a  necessary  evil,  to  be  reduced  to 
a  minimum,  or  to  be  wholly  exterminated.     American 
political  thought  was  not,  of  course,  so  hostile  to  the 
very  idea  of  the  state  as  was  that  either  of  the  French 
Encyclopedists  or  of  the  English  Liberals ;   for  here  in 
America  it  was  not  a  political  struggle  against  despot- 
ism   that    directed   political    thought,    but    an    almost 
inborn  instinct  of  self-assertion  fortified  with  a  reli- 
gious feeling  of  independence.     Yet  that  instinct  was 
thoroughly  individualistic,  and  as  such  was  the  pre- 
vailing idea  of  New  England  Puritanism  and  of  the 
"fathers"  of  1776.     In  spite  of  the  modern  encroach- 
ments of  collectivism  and  centralization,  the  country  of 
Jefferson  even  after  a  century  of  federal  government 
remains  more  faithful  to  that  old  spirit  of  individualism 
than  the  country  of  Rousseau. 

Under  these  conditions,  socialism  had  to  meet  a 
formidable    adversary    in    the    politically    full-grown 


THE  SOCIALISTIC  IDEA  ^^^7 

democracy  of  the  English-speaking  countries.  The 
distrust  of  the  state  existing  in  these  countries  had  first 
to  be  overcome,  and  the  idea  of  state  interference  to  be 
made  famihar  to  them,  before  the  collectivist  view 
could  be  substituted  for  the  individualistic  in  politics 
and  social  life.  The  advocates  of  the  new  movement 
themselves  avow  that  they  are  not  yet  far  beyond  this 
very  threshold  of  socialism  either  in  England  or  in 
America.  One  is  here  particularly  slow  to  recognize 
at  the  bottom  of  the  general  "social  unrest"  the 
struggle  of  the  "masses"  against  the  "classes;"  mere 
"  municipalization  "  schemes  and  the  expansion  of  state 
enterprise  often  are  considered  —  and  either  extolled 
or  denounced  —  as  socialism,  the  means  thus  being 
taken  for  the  end.  The  socialistic  spirit  to  a  large 
extent  remains  "unconscious  of  itself." 

This  is  totally  different  in  countries  of  a  more 
recent  political  life  and  a  less  developed  democracy. 
The  case  of  Germany  may  help  us  to  realize  the  condi- 
tions underlying  the  development  and  the  possible 
future  of  socialism  in  Russia.  In  both  countries  social- 
ism found  the  ground  of  its  activity  unoccupied;  its 
rivals  weak  or  wanting;  the  machine  for  centralized 
political  activity  quite  ready.  The  only  task  remaining 
was  to  take  possession  of  the  steering-wheel.  The 
state  of  Frederic  the  Great,  as  well  as  that  of  Peter  the 
Great,  already  was  a  huge  machine  of  centralized 
bureaucracy.  Both  rulers  were  somewhat  acquainted 
with  the  theory  of  the  "social  compact;"  but  both 
built  upon  it  their  own  system  of  "enlightened  abso- 
lutism." After  this  superstructure  was  ready,  a  new 
school  of  lawyers  and  politicians  rejected  the  theo- 


338  RUSSIA  AND  ITS  CRISIS 

retical  foundation  as  "shallow"  and  "rationalistic." 
They  declared  that  the  absolutistic  state  did  not  need 
any  fictitious  "consent"  or  "compact,"  since  it  was 
firmly  founded  on  a  historic  basis  —  on  centuries  of 
unconscious  submission  and  rule;  and  they  justified  its 
further  existence  by  the  philosophic  argument  that  it 
was  a  great  instrument  for  the  education  of  the  national 
spirit. 

The  state  was  now  considered,  not  a  "necessary 
evil "  to  be  tolerated,  but  an  unmixed  blessing,  a  provi- 
dential good  predestined  to  lead  humanity  to  its  highest 
destination  and  fullest  freedom.  These  ideas  of  the 
state,  originated  by  a  Fichte  and  a  Hegel,  were 
indorsed  by  a  Lassalle  and  a  Marx.  In  a  sense,  social- 
ism was  to  become  the  "  enlightened  absolutism "  of 
democracy  —  quite  the  opposite  of  the  anarchistic  idea 
of  a  free  federation  of  individuals.  Since  a  democracy 
of  voluntary  associations  for  economic  purposes  —  a 
strictly  professional,  non-socialistic  organization  of 
labor  —  had  never  been  strongly  developed  in  Ger- 
many; no  anarchistic  scheme  like  that  of  Proudhon 
could  there  take  root.  Voluntary  co-operation  was  in 
Germany  dreamt  of  only  by  men  like  Schultze-Delitsch ; 
and  this  dream  was  dispelled  and  made  the  subject  of 
derision  in  the  very  beginning  of  the  serious  socialistic 
agitation.  Thus  the  German  labor  party  came  into 
existence  both  as  a  socialistic  and  as  a  centralistic  party, 
not  as  a  trade-unionist  and  an  anarchistic  one.  Far 
from  repudiating  the  state,  the  German  socialists  tried 
to  take  hold  of  it  by  means  of  the  universal  suffrage,  in 
order  to  use  its  machinery  for  the  bringing  about  of  a 
social  revolution.     German   socialism,   we  need  only 


THE  SOCIALISTIC  IDEA 


339 


remind  ourselves,  began  by  entering  into  negotiations 
with  Bismarck,  and  it  gradually  grew  into  a  great 
parliamentary  party  ready  to  work  —  at  least  in  the 
persons  of  its  more  conservative  members  —  "not  for 
the  better  future,  but  for  the  better  present^'  thus  sub- 
stituting the  idea  of  social  reform  for  that  of  social 
revolution. 

Russian  socialism,  then,  differs  from  German  social- 
ism in  that  it  carries  to  an  extreme  the  features  which 
have  made  German  socialism  differ  from  English  and 
American.  If  in  the  English-speaking  countries 
democracy  is  not  socialistic,  and  not  likely  to  become 
such  in  a  measurable  space  of  time,  in  Germany  it  is 
socialistic,  though  German  socialism  is  endeavoring 
more  and  more  to  disavow  its  revolutionary  beginnings. 
In  Russia  it  is  both  socialistic  and  revolutionary. 
Trade-unionism  which,  within  the  region  of  the  Anglo- 
Saxon  race,  is  becoming  master  of  the  situation  and  is 
gradually  imbibing  the  spirit  of  socialism,  in  Germany 
is  conservative  and  is  overruled  by  socialism  proper; 
while  in  Russia  it  is  the  autocratic  government  that 
recently  tried  to  start  trade-unionism  in  opposition  to 
the  overpowering  propaganda  of  socialism.*  At  the 
bottom  of  these  and  similar  differences,  however,  lies 
the  fact  that  both  in  England  and  in  America  democ- 
racy has  had  to  become  conscious  of  itself;  its  decisive 
victories  were  won  long  before  socialism  appeared; 
while  in  Germany  democracy  awoke  to  consciousness 
simultaneously  wnth  the  growth  of  socialism,  and  in 
Russia  democracy  was  to  be  awakened  by  socialism. 
In  each  case  the  ultimate  explanation  is  thus  found  in 

'See  p.  541. 


340  RUSSIA  AND  ITS  CRISIS 

the  degree  of  development  of  individualism  previous  to 
the  appearance  of  socialism. 

Russian  socialism  met  with  no  opposition  from  the 
individualistic  spirit,  and  found  no  organized  democ- 
racy. Every  page  of  the  social  history  of  Russia 
explains  why  it  is  so.  We  have  seen  that  the  bour- 
geoisie did  not  exist  in  Russia,  and  that  that  country 
never  developed  such  an  intense  social  life  as  that  which 
in  mediaeval  Europe  succeeded  in  balancing  the  central 
power  of  absolute  monarchy,  and  which  in  modern 
Europe  is  sufficient  to  hold  in  check  the  absolute 
democracy  of  the  socialism  of  today.  Whatever  in 
these  conditions  was  unfavorable  to  individualism  and 
liberalism  favored,  and  still  favors,  collectivism  in 
Russia.  This  also  is  the  reason  why  it  was  not  so 
easy  for  socialism  itself  to  become  a  class  doctrine  in 
Russia.  Socialism  as  well  as  liberalism  for  a  long 
time  remained  "  intellectual ; "  and  if  liberalism  was  so 
because  it  was  opposed  to  the  interests  of  its  own  class, 
socialism  was  so  because  —  and  as  long  as  —  it  repre- 
sented the  class  which  was  as  yet  unable  to  speak  in 
its  own  name  and  to  articulate  its  own  demands.  The 
next  consequence  of  this  similarity  of  conditions  was 
that  Russian  liberalism  and  Russian  socialism  were 
not  at  all  mutually  exclusive.  Russian  liberalism  was 
always  tinged  with  democratism,  and  Russian  democ- 
ratism has  been  strongly  impregnated  with  socialistic 
teachings  and  tendencies  ever  since  socialism  made 
its  appearance.  To  be  sure,  the  modern  —  and  pre- 
dominant—  socialistic  doctrine  in  Russia  today  is  a 
strictly  class  doctrine  —  that  of  the  German  socialistic 
democratism  of  Marx ;  but  we  shall  see  that  the  other 


THE  SOCIALISTIC  IDEA  '341 

large  division  of  Russian  socialism  still  clings  to  the 
former  Russian  idea :  the  negation  of  every  class  dis- 
tinction, rather  than  the  self-assertion  of  only  one 
class,  the  "proletariat." 

The  main  point  in  the  history  of  Russian  socialism 
is  this  change  from  the  latter  point  of  view  to  the 
former  —  a  transition  which  was  only  gradually  taking 
place.  We  designated  the  modern  view  as  that  of  the 
"  scientific "  socialism  of  Marx.  We  may  designate 
the  earlier  view  as  that  of  " Utopian  socialism"  —  or 
the  anarchism  of  Bakoonin.  Bakoonin  and  Marx  — 
the  beginning  and  the  end  of  Russian  socialism !  The; 
fundamental  conception  of  the  Marxist  view  is  that  th( 
class-consciousness  of  the  "proletarians"  is  gradually 
and  necessarily  rising  with  the  development  of  capital 
ism,  and  that  the  proletariat  must  take  possession  of 
the  political  power,  in  order  to  consummate  the  social 
revolution  which  had  already  been  prepared  by  the' 
whole  process  of  economical  development.  The  view 
of  Bakoonin  was  that  the  masses  are  and  always  have 
been  socialistic,  and  that  the  Russian  —  or  rather  the 
Slav  —  masses  are  so  in  particular,  because  they  live 
under  the  regime  of  communal  property.  They  need 
not  to  be  taught  socialism ;  they  need  only  to  be" 
awakened :  the  whole  remaining  task  of  changing  th^ 
social  order  will  be  accomplished  by  the  masses  them- 
selves, from  beneath  by  way  of  the  free  federation  oi 
communes. 

Both  these  views  of  socialism  appeal  to  the  Rus- 
sian "  masses;  "  but  before  entering  into  further  details, 
we  must  first  know  what  these  "  masses  "  are,  and  what 
is  likely  to  be  their  active  part  in  the  socialist  move- 


342  RUSSIA  AND  ITS  CRISIS 

ment.  Let  us  proceed,  therefore,  to  a  sketch  —  which 
we  shall  make  as  short  as  possible  —  of  the  Russian 
lower  classes,  and  of  their  aspirations  in  the  past  and 
in  the  present. 

It  is  well  known  that  the  lower  classes  in  Russia 
consist  largely  of  agriculturists;  more  than  80  per 
cent,  of  the  population  are  peasapts.  The  number  of 
workingmen  in  the  factories  does  not  exceed  two  mil- 
lions, and  to  a  large  extent  even  now  they  form,  not  a 
separate  social  class,  but  a  part  of  the  same  peasant 
class  which  finds  temporary  employment  in  the  factor- 
ies as  an  addition  to  their  farm  work.  The  political 
role  of  the  workingman  has  just  begun,  and  as  was  to 
be  expected,  it  at  once  gave  an  important  meaning  to 
the  socialistic  propaganda.  But  even  now  no  general 
scheme  of  the  socialistic  reconstruction  of  society  can 
be  planned  —  in  Russia  less  than  in  any  other  country 
—  unless  the  interests  of  the  agricultural  population  are 
taken  into  consideration.  This  is  what  makes  the  posi- 
tion of  Russian  socialism  particularly  difficult  when 
compared  with  that  of  countries  more  industrially 
developed.  The  labor  movement  in  Russia  is  develop- 
ing along  lines  pretty  similar  to  those  of  other  coun- 
tries; but  the  agrarian  movement  cannot  but  be  very 
peculiar.  That  is  why  we  must  concentrate  our  chief 
attention  upon  the  position  of  the  peasants. 

More  than  forty  years  have  passed  since  the  Rus- 
sian peasants  were  emancipated.  Social  habits  in  the 
meantime  have  changed  greatly  to  their  advantage. 
Still,  they  remain  a  separate  caste ;  and  the  very  latest 
cry   of    Russian    public    opinion^    has    been    for    the 

-  See  p.  529. 


THE  SOCIALISTIC  IDEA  343 

equalization  of  the  peasant  with  the  other  social  orders, 
as  far  as  their  personal  rights  are  concerned. 

Emancipation,  indeed,  did  not  make  the  Russian 
peasants  equal  with  other  citizens  of  the  empire.  This 
was  partly  the  result  of  too  much  care  bestowed  on 
them  by  their  nationalistic-democratic  liberators,  who 
were  afraid  lest,  should  the  peasants  mix  up  with  the 
other  classes,  slavery  might  return,  or  lest  the  national- 
istic type  of  Russian  peasantry  might  perish.  Thus 
they  prevented  every  intermixture  of  the  Russian  vil- 
lage communities  with  outsiders :  the  Russian  Mir  had 
to  remain  a  world  by  itself,  ruled  by  the  elected  alder- 
men; judged  by  its  own  judges  according  to  its  own 
customs,  supposed  to  be  transmitted  orally  from  father 
to  son ;  managing  its  economic  affairs  by  a  democratic 
convent ;  and  allotting  and  redistributing  its  communal 
lands  among  the  heads  of  families,  according  to  the 
wants  and  working  capacity  of  each  member.  The 
Mir  was  even  given  the  right  of  interfering  in  family 
affairs,  and  of  chastising  its  members  by  flogging  them 
or  bending  them  into  exile. 

But  the  Mir  as  it  actually  was  did  not  much 
resemble  the  ideals  of  the  Russian  democratic  nation- 
alists.^ The  organization  of  the  commune  always  was, 
and  always  remained,  first  and  foremost  a  weapon  in 
the  hands  of  the  government  for  assessing  and  levying 
taxes,  and  for  getting  every  kind  of  local  duties  per- 
formed. Therefore  the  elected  aldermen  of  the  village 
became  a  kind  of  lower  police  officials,  responsible  to 
every  other  authority,  but  not  to  their  own  electors. 
This  position  was  so  difficult  that  it  was  shunned  by 

"  See  p.  271. 


344  RUSSIA  AND  ITS  CRISIS 

every  worthy  man  in  the  village.  The  village  judges 
were  not  much  better,  and  their  custom-founded  law- 
very  often  proved  to  be  no  law  at  all.  The  only  literate 
man  in  the  village  frecjuently  happened  to  be  the  vil- 
lage clerk ;  and  he  used  his  position  of  influence  to  lead 
the  community  affairs  as  best  suited  its  w^ealthy  and 
powerful  members.  Thus  the  person  and  property  of 
everybody  within  the  village  commune  were  entirely 
dependent  on  the  good-will  of  a  certain  few.  This  evil 
became  so  evident  that  the  state  tried  to  mend  matters ; 
but  it  only  succeeded,  however,  in  making  them  still 
worse  by  the  sort  of  measure  it  resorted  to.  The  good- 
will of  the  few  was  supplanted  by  the  good-will  of  one 
—  the  new  "rural  commander,"  an  officer  introduced 
in  1800.'*  virtually  possessing  unlimited  power  over  the 
village  members,  communal  meetings,  and  authorities. 
This,  of  course,  only  served  to  strengthen  the  regime 
of  arbitrariness  and  to  accentuate  the  exceptional  posi- 
tion of  the  Russian  peasant  before  the  law  and  among 
the  other  social  orders.  The  peasant  representation  in 
the  Zemstvos,  already  insignificant,  was  practically 
annihilated,  because  the  elections  could  always  be 
directed  by  the  "rural  commander,"  and  he  himself 
was  for  the  most  part  elected  to  sit  beside  the  peasant 
representatives  and  tell  them  how  to  vote.  At  home 
he  was  master  of  all  the  decisions  of  the  Mir,  and  so 
every  individual  was  completely  in  his  power.  Very 
often  he  even  outwardly  indulged  in  playing  the  part  of 
the  landlord  of  olden  times.  He  addressed  the  peasants 
with  the  old-fashioned  "thou"  instead  of  "you;"  and 
demanded  that  they  should  bow  and  take  off  their  hats 

*  See  p.  300. 


THE  SOCIALISTIC  IDEA  345 

whenever  they  met  him.  Sometimes  he  personally 
condescended  to  beat  them,  and  scolding  was  the 
natural  tone  of  his  conversation.  Woe  to  him  who, 
feeling  his  personal  dignity  offended,  would  grow 
irreverent.  There  is  a  terrible  provision  in  the  institu- 
tion for  "rural  commanders"  which  enables  them, 
without  further  formalities,  to  imprison  such  peasants 
as  hesitate  immediately  to  execute  their  "  legal  "  order; 
the  legality  of  it  being  left  to  their  own  determination. 
The  economic  position  of  the  Russian  peasant  by 
and  by  became  still  worse,  if  possible,  than  his  position 
before  the  law,  because  economic  evils  were  much  more 
acutely  felt.  Already  by  the  conditions  of  the  emanci- 
pation his  economic  position  was  unsatisfactory.  The 
redemption  money  —  the  price  he  had  to  pay  for  the 
allotment  bought  from  his  former  landlord  —  was 
often  too  high.  Still  worse,  the  size  of  his  lot  nearly 
always  was  too  small;  and,  in  consequence  of  the 
increased  number  in  the  family,^  it  has  grown  even 
smaller  since  then.  Moreover,  the  lots  apportioned  to 
the  emancipated  peasants  were  almost  invariably  cho- 
sen from  the  worst  parts  of  the  landlord's  domain ;  and 
generally  they  were  scattered  and  divided  into  narrow 
strips  located  among  the  landlord's  possessions,  which 
made  cultivation  difficult  and  pasture  impossible,  for 
fear  of  possible  transgression,  followed  by  a  suit  for 
damages  from  the  influential  neighbor.  A  system  of 
fees  was  sometimes  formally  introduced  by  such 
neighbors  for  petty  trespasses  of  the  peasants,  to  be 
paid  in  the  form  of  manual  work  on  their  estates  —  a 

'  For  further  details  on  this  point  see  chap,  vii. 


346  RUSSIA  AND  ITS  CRISIS 

custom  which  virtually  meant  the  re-establishment  of 
slavery. 

Worse  than  all  this,  however,  was  the  position  of 
the  peasants  toward  the  usurers,  or  village  creditors, 
who  charged  enormous  interest  for  loans.    Loans  were 
unavoidable,  as  there  was  no  accessible  petty  credit  for 
such  members  of  the  village  as  most  needed  it.    At  the 
same  time,  the  peasant  has  always  been  a  stepchild  of 
the  financial  administration  of  Russia.     Of  course,  the 
time  was  past  when  the  peasants  and  the  inhabitants  of 
boroughs  were  the  only  "taxpayers."     Some  of  the 
direct  taxes  which  were  most  burdensome  in  former 
times  have  recently  been  reduced  or  repealed.     But,  at 
the    same    time,    indirect    taxation    has    enormously 
increased,  and  the  peasant  is  virtually  robbed  of  what- 
ever small  income  he  has.®    After  all  of  the  many  items 
have  been  paid,  little,  if  any,  surplus  remains.     First 
the  peasant  has  to  pay  taxes,  and,  though  the  mode  of 
levying  them  has  to  a  certain  degree  been  improved, 
this  makes  no  difference  to  him,  since  his  paying  capac- 
ity remains  the  same  as  before.     In  fact,  the  paying 
power  of  the  peasants  is  so  exhausted  that  often  they 
are  in  arrears  to  the  government  for  full  three  years. 
For   those   who    know   the   severity   of   the    Russian 
methods  of  levying  taxes  it  is  easy  to  realize  the  utterly 
hopeless    state   of   affairs   signified   by   these   arrears. 
Then,  besides  his  taxes,  the  peasant  has  to  pay  rent  on 
such  lots  as  he  rents  from  his  neighbors,  generally  at 
an  exceedingly  high  rate.'^     And,  finally,  he  has  to  pay 
interest  on  his  debts.    Not  having  either  cash  or  cheap 

"  For  further  details  on  this  point  see  chap.  vii. 
'See  examples,  p.  451,  note  6. 


THE  SOCIALISTIC  IDEA  347 

credit,  he  invariably  is  obliged  to  sell  what  he  needs  for 
himself.  He  sells  his  grain  in  the  autumn,  when  it  is 
cheap,  to  buy  it  again  for  seed  in  the  spring,  when  it 
is  dear.  His  working  days  for  the  coming  summer  he 
sells  in  advance,  at  prices  that  are  a  mockery;  and 
when  the  time  comes  to  fulfil  his  engagements,  he  tries 
to  shirk  them,  going  off  a  hundred  miles  or  so  in 
search  of  new  work  in  a  haphazard  way;  very  often 
he  does  not  find  anything,  and  comes  back  a  tramp  and 
a  pauper.  Good  crops  do  not  always  help  him  out, 
because  then  grain  is  cheap  and,  not  being  able  to  wait 
for  better  prices  or  to  find  a  wholesale  purchaser,  he 
sells  it  for  a  pitiable  sum  to  the  petty  agents.  Bad 
crops  ruin  him  entirely  and  bring  him  to  starvation. 
And  bad  crops  are  probable,  because  his  tilling  is  quite 
primitive,  there  is  no  such  thing  as  artificial  irrigation, 
and  the  first  drought  may  destroy  everything.  Then 
he  may  have  to  sell  his  cow  and  his  horse,  give  up  his 
lot  to  his  village,  and  go  to  the  city  in  search  of  work. 

But  what  about  the  Russian  Mir,  the  village  com- 
munity? Is  it  not  said  to  bring  help  and  salvation  to 
every  one  of  its  members,  to  give  him  his  full  share  in 
the  rights  of  the  commune,  in  its  lands,  its  pastures,  its 
woods?  Has  it  not  always  been  looked  upon  as  the 
institution  to  prevent  Russia  from  the  danger  of  a 
proletariat  of  paupers  ? 

Well,  whatever  opinion  one  may  choose  to  hold 
concerning  the  Russian  Mir  (and  the  opinions  are  very 
many  and  very  different),  he  cannot  possibly  expect 
that  the  Mir  will  give  to  its  members  what  it  does  not 
itself  possess.  It  is  the  Mir  itself  that  has  grown  poor 
and  indigent;  the  Mir  that  has  no  more  land  to  give; 


348  RUSSIA  AND  ITS  CRISIS 

the  Mir  that  accumulates  the  arrears,  in  spite  of  the 
joint  responsibihty  for  the  payment  of  taxes  by  which 
its  members  were  bound  until  very  recently.  Thus  far 
everybody  will  agree  that  it  is  not  the  Mir,  but  the 
general  deterioration  of  agriculture  and  the  material 
distress  of  the  Russian  village,  that  is  answerable  for 
the  present  condition  of  things.  But  has  not  the  Mir 
itself  contributed  to  the  causes  mentioned?  Is  it  not 
the  Mir  that  prevents  the  general  cure  and  makes  it 
impossible  ? 

Here  opinions  largely  differ.  "The  Mir  hinders 
any  change  in  the  primitive  system  of  culture,"  some 
people  claim,  "  and  thus  precludes  the  possibility  of  any 
agricultural  progress."  To  this  others  reply  that  the 
Mir  is  quite  as  able  as  an  individual,  and  perhaps  even 
more  so,  to  introduce  any  amelioration  that  may  be 
desired.  "  The  Mir  fetters  the  individual,  stops  every 
private  initiative,  and  thus  makes  any  further  develop- 
ment impossible,"  say  the  opponents  of  the  Russian 
village  community.  This  is  met  by  the  assertion  that 
quite  the  opposite  is  the  case ;  the  Mir  preserves  for  the 
future  stores  of  resources  for  a  harmonious  develop- 
ment of  individuality,  being  indeed  the  only  institution 
that  guarantees  the  possibility  of  any  such  develop- 
ment. "  The  village  community  must  be  annihilated," 
its  adversaries  say,  "  in  order  that  as  many  as  possible 
may  be  permitted  to  save  themselves  from  general 
shipwreck  in  an  economic  debacle,  wherein  the  whole 
commune  will  otherwise  be  submerged.  Rather  let 
some  of  the  peasants  secure  well-being  than  all  become 
paupers."  "No,"  the  adherents  of  the  Mir  reply; 
"  the  Mir  must  be  preserved  in  order  that  all  be  saved 


THE  SOCIALISTIC  IDEA  349 

for  a  better  future;  otherwise  Russia  will  take  the 
path  of  capitalistic  development,  and  there  will  be  a 
few  who  are  wealthy,  while  all  the  rest  will  turn  into 
proletarians."  But  that  is  exactly  what  is  really  going 
on  now  within  the  village  community  itself,  in  spite  of 
all  the  regulations  and  dispositions  of  law  for  pre- 
serving material  equality,"  the  adversaries  of  the  com- 
munity argue.  "  The  fact  is  only  hypothetical,"  its  ad- 
herents retort.  The  differentiation  of  the  constituent 
elements  of  the  village  is  by  no  means  so  great  as  it  was 
presumed  to  be;  at  least  nobody  can  prove  it,  since 
there  exist  no  exhaustive  studies  of  the  actual  con- 
ditions in  the  Russian  village. 

Thus  do  Russian  scholars  and  publicists  disagree 
on  the  subject  of  the  Russian  Mir,  and  public  opinion 
on  this  point  is  very  uncertain.  In  general,  one  may 
say  that  the  individualistic  tendency  has  constantly 
gained  ground  in  the  views  of  both  scholars  and  prac- 
tical philanthropists,  as  far  as  the  village  community  is 
concerned.  A  pet  child  of  Russian  public  opinion,  the 
Mir  has  always  given  it  much  more  disappointment 
than  satisfaction.  Concerning  its  past,  views  have 
entirely  changed.  The  village  community  is  no  longer 
considered  as  an  aboriginal  and  thoroughly  democratic 
institution,  such  as  it  was  once  looked  upon,  not  only 
when  it  was  first  discovered  by  Russian  Slavophils  and 
by  the  German  scholar.  Baron  Haxthausen,  about 
1840,  but  even  twenty  or  thirty  years  later,  when  Ger- 
man medisevalists  constructed  on  the  village  com- 
munity the  whole  fabric  of  their  constitutional  history, 
and  Henry  Sumner  Maine  found  a  place  for  it  in 
the  general  scheme  of  comparative  politics.     Modern 


350  RUSSIA  AND  ITS  CRISIS 

research,  led  by  such  eminent  scholars  as  Fustel  de 
Coulanges  or  Mr.  Seebohm,  came  to  the  conclusion 
that  village  communities  are  by  no  means  so  elementary 
and  so  antediluvian  as  they  were  supposed  to  be.  And 
now  the  point  of  view  of  Henry  S.  Maine  has  been 
entirely  abandoned  in  his  own  branch  of  study,  as  may 
be  judged  from  the  excellent  book  of  Mr.  Baden- 
Powell,  Village  Communities  in  India,  which  forms 
an  excellent  introduction  to  the  understanding  of  the 
origin  of  the  Russian  Mir.  This  origin  was,  indeed, 
multiform;  but  the  unique  character  of  the  present 
Russian  commune  has  evolved  from  these  different 
forms  under  the  undisputed  influence  of  two  powerful 
agents:  state  authority  as  far  as  the  financial  and 
administrative  organization  of  the  commune  is  con- 
cerned, and  landlord  authority  as  far  as  economical 
unity  is  concerned.  Both  forces  worked  in  the  same 
direction,  and  some  results  of  their  combined  action 
may  be  traced  to  the  fourteenth  century,  and  even 
earlier;  others,  to  the  eighteenth  century,  and  even 
later.  The  outcome  is  the  existing  Russian  village 
community. 

Now,  of  course,  this  genesis  of  the  Russian  Mir, 
whatever  it  might  have  been,  cannot  have  the  slightest 
influence  on  its  present  position  and  its  future  role  in 
the  structure  of  Russian  society.  All  we  may  say  is 
that  the  agents  which  contributed  to  the  making  of  the 
Mir  are  now  partly  absent,  partly  decreasing.  There 
are  no  landlord  authorities  to  direct  the  commune ;  and 
the  financial  ties  of  the  state  have  also  been  much 
loosened.  At  the  same  time,  the  individualistic,  the 
centrifugal,  tendency  undoubtedly  increases  within  the 


THE  SOCIALISTIC  IDEA  351 

limits  of  the  ;Mir,  along  with  the  material  and  moral 
development  of  its  members,  slow  as  this  process  may 
be. 

The  qnestian  for  a  state  facing  this  process  of  dis- 
location is :  What  must  be  our  agrarian  policy  ?  And 
the  problem  is  as  important  as  it  is  intricate  and  diffi- 
cult of  immediate  solution.  The  traditional  position 
occupied  by  the  Russian  government  consisted  of  a 
kind  of  state  socialism,  which  coincided  queerly  with 
the  point  of  view  of  one  of  the  socialistic  factions.  The 
peasant  lands  were  considered  as  belonging  to  the  state ; 
that  is,  to  the  nation.  Now,  from  this  point  of  view  it 
was  a  most  difficult  thing  to  decide  what  was  the  mean- 
ing of  the  redemption  of  their  ancient  allotments  by  the 
peasants  emancipated  from  serfdom.  Were  the  lands 
purchased  by  the  peasants  to  be  considered  as  their 
own?  Or  were  they  to  become,  as  the  lands  of  the 
crown  peasants  were  formerly  supposed  to  be,  state 
property?  And,  if  the  redeemed  lots  were  to  be  con- 
sidered as  the  property  of  the  peasants,  were  they  the 
individual  property  of  every  purchaser,  or  the  collective 
property  of  the  whole  commune;  /.  c,  something  inter- 
mediate between  private  and  state  property  ?  In  spite 
of  the  fundamental  importance  of  a  clear  answer,  the 
problem  was  left  unsolved.  It  therefore  remains  to  be 
settled  by  a  compromise  between  further  legislation 
and  the  actual  conditions  of  peasant  life  itself.  Legis- 
lation on  the  subject  has  been  uncertain  and  shifting. 
At  first  (after  the  emancipation)  it  favored  the  indi- 
vidualistic view,  but  recoiled  from  its  practical  conse- 
quences. Without  formally  proclaiming  the  lands  of 
the  peasants  the  collective  property  of  the  communities, 


352  RUSSIA  AND  ITS  CRISIS 

it  practically  took  this  view,  and,  as  a  consequence,  for- 
bade any  sale  of  redeemed  allotments,  subjected  divi- 
sions of  the  lots  among  family  members  to  strict 
regulations,  and  made  periodical  redivisions  of  allot- 
ments obligatory  within  a  certain  period  of  years.  It 
seems,  however,  that  in  practice  these  regulations  are 
often  eluded,  and  that  they  do  not  prevent  the  process 
of  the  individualization  of  landed  property,  as  well  as 
the  differentiation  of  a  village  population  into  rich  and 
poor  —  such  as  have  more  than  the  average  and  such 
as  practically  possess  nothing.  The  views  of  the  peas- 
ants themselves  are  utterly  at  variance,  dijffering  chiefly 
according  to  the  different  conditions  of  existence  in  the 
various  sections  of  Russia.  Tilling  the  soil  has  never 
been  considered  a  profitable  business  in  Russia;  and 
the  government,  with  its  taxes  and  other  requests,  has 
fully  transformed  it  into  a  state  "duty,  a  particular  kind 
of  "state  service."  This  was  what  made  the  existence 
of  a  village  community,  with  its  joint  responsibility,  so 
necessary  to  the  government.  But  after  the  emancipa- 
tion, conditions  entirely  changed;  it  now  was  indi- 
vidual profit  and  interest,  and  not  state  interference, 
that  was  to  keep  people  in  their  former  occupations  or 
to  drive  them  away  from  them.  Under  these  condi- 
tions, wherever  tilling  of  the  land  looks  profitable  for 
the  future,  individualistic  tendencies  will  have  their 
way;  and  to  resist  the  dissolution  of  the  village  com- 
munity will  be  a  most  difficult  enterprise.  But  there 
exist,  particularly  in  the  north  and  east  of  Russia,  a 
good  many  peasants  who  are  satisfied  with  being  able 
to  live  upon  their  lots  of  land,  without  drawing  any 
profit;   and  for  this  element,  generally  the  most  con- 


THE  SOCIALISTIC  IDEA  353 

servative,  the  traditional  village  community  will  be 
preserved  for  many  years  to  come.  Before  long  this 
dififerentiation  of  forms  of  property  must  become  quite 
patent,  and  particularizing  legislation  will  then  be 
needed. 

But  we  may  not  pursue  this  interesting  subject 
farther.  It  was  touched  upon  here  only  to  prepare  for 
the  understanding  of  such  solutions  as  have  been  sug- 
gested by  the  different  socialistic  factions,  for  all  of 
which  the  question  of  the  Mir  is  one  of  the  most,  if  not 
the  most,  important.  We  now  know  something  of  the 
juridical  and  economic  position  of  the  peasants.  Let 
us  see  what  are  the  political  ideas  and  aspirations  of  the 
Russian  peasantry.  After  that  we  must  proceed  to  the 
study  of  the  Russian  revolutionary  movement. 

We  cannot  expect,  of  course,  to  find  political  con- 
sciousness very  highly  developed  among  the  Russian 
peasantry.  Still,  a  certain  amount  of  it  has  always  been 
present.  Political  ideas  among  them  took  the  shape 
most  convenient  for  oral  transmission  among  illiterate 
people :  the  form  of  a  legend,  of  a  popular  saying;  and 
the  slower  and  simpler  the  means  of  transmission  were, 
the  stronger  was  the  action  of  political  axioms  impreg- 
nated on  the  popular  mind.  These  ideas  proved  able  to 
live  through  centuries,  and  to  survive  the  most  con- 
vincing disproof  furnished  by  historical  events.  The 
chief  of  these  fixed  ideas  was  that  of  the  democratism 
of  autocracy.  We  know  that  this  idea  played  an 
important  role  in  Russian  nationalistic  views;  but 
undoubtedly  it  also  made  up  an  important  ingredient 
of  the  popular  political  consciousness.  The  origin  of 
the  idea  is  very  ancient;   it  appears  together  with  the 


354  RUSSIA  AND  ITS  CRISIS 

actual  policy  of  the  Muscovite  princes  directed  against 
the  aristocracy  in  the  sixteenth  century.  John  IV.,  the 
chief  enemy  of  the  aristocracy,  particularly  impressed 
the  popular  imagination  with  his  bloody  and  violent 
methods  of  political  struggle  against  the  people's  ene- 
mies and  his  own.  Popular  songs  like  to  represent  him 
in  a  picturesque  attitude  —  putting  on  the  Byzantine 
purple  and  waving  the  imperial  scepter,  while  he  boasts 
and  threatens  loudly :  "  I  will  extirpate  treason  from 
the  Russian  land."  "Treason"  then  meant  the  politi- 
cal influence  of  the  ancient  ducal  aristocracy.  The 
Tsar  had  the  people's  sympathy,  because  he  was  com- 
bating the  lords;  and  he  was  entirely  conscious  of  it. 
He  even  went  so  far  as  to  request  a  kind  of  formal 
plenipotence  from  the  lower  classes  to  help  him  in  his 
struggle  with  the  higher.  To  this  end  he  formally 
resigned  his  power,  and  then  arranged  a  sort  of 
re-election  of  himself,  while  he  made  representatives  of 
the  different  classes  ask  him  to  resume  his  dignity  on 
the  express  condition  of  dealing  freely  with  his  and  the 
state's  enemies. 

All  these  things  produced  such  a  profound  impres- 
sion on  the  popular  mind  that,  even  when  the  dynasty 
had  become  extinct  with  the  death  of  John's  son, 
Theodore  (1598),  the  people  were  ready  to  support 
the  first  impostor  who  should  proclaim  himself  the 
Tsar's  other  son,  Demetrius  (who  had  been  stabbed  in 
his  infancy,  to  clear  the  way  for  Theodore's  brother-in- 
law,  Boris  Godoonov).  It  was  in  vain  that  the  few 
remaining  aristocrats  tried  to  use  this  interregnum  for 
abolishing  autocracy.  They  were  in  favor  of  a  consti- 
tution, with  a  higher  chamber  of  "  Tsar's  councilors  " 


THE  SOCIALISTIC  IDEA  355 

and  a  lower  chamber  representing  "all  the  people." 
But  this  political  program  of  the  Russian  hoyars  was 
decidedly  unpopular  with  the  masses.  An  attempt  to 
elect  a  Tsar  boyar  (Basilius  Shooysky),  ruling  on  such 
constitutional  lines,  ended  in  a  popular  mutiny,  and  the 
Tsar  boyar  was  forced  to  talce  orders.  The  autocracy, 
owing  to  the  popular  support,  went  out  from  that  first 
trial  victorious. 

We  know,  however,  that  the  theory  of  a  democratic 
autocracy  cherished  by  the  people  did  not  at  all  corre- 
spond to  any  reality.  And  the  people  very  soon  began 
to  find  this  out.  The  Muscovite  government,  to  be 
sure,  eradicated  the  aristocracy,  but  at  the  same  time  it 
formed  a  new  class  of  warriors,  "the  men  of  service," 
who  were  even  more  dangerous  to  the  peasants.^  The 
original  idea  may  have  been  to  transform  the  peasants 
who  were  granted  to  the  warriors  together  with  their 
land  into  a  sort  of  Russian  "  helots ; "  i.  e.,  state  peas- 
ants whose  work  and  income  were  taxed  only  with  a 
certain  legally  determined  duty  for  the  benefit  of  the 
soldiers.  There  were  even  some  Russian  publicists 
who  advised  the  government  of  John  IV.  not  to  let 
warriors  settle  in  the  villages  granted  to  them,  but  to 
oblige  them  to  live  in  cities,  where  their  peasants  had 
to  provide  for  their  support ;  or  to  let  the  peasants  pay 
their  duty  directly  to  the  exchequer,  from  which  sal- 
aries then  were  to  be  paid  to  the  warriors.  Now,  the 
organization  of  the  state  at  that  time  was  too  elemen- 
tary to  make  this  arrangement  possible.  And  so  the 
warriors  were  left  to  deal  as  they  would  with  their 
peasants.    No  restrictions  of  law  were  provided  for  the 

"  See  pp.  222  fif. 


356  RUSSIA  AND  ITS  CRISIS 

protection  of  these  latter,  and,  as  a  result,  the  first 
germs  of  slavery  soon  appeared  in  the  practice  of  the 
landlords.  Now  the  political  consciousness  of  the  peas- 
ants became  enriched  by  a  new  element :  their  social 
protest  against  their  new  possessors.  The  first  form, 
however,  which  this  protest  assumed  was  merely  pas- 
sive. It  was  flight  from  the  landlords.  Just  then  the 
government  was  rendering  the  southern  frontier  com- 
paratively safe  from  Tartar  raids,  and  there  began  that 
settlement  of  the  south  which  we  described  in  chap,  i." 
The  discontented  peasants  fled  away  from  their  land- 
lords to  the  steppes.  The  most  daring  and  reckless  ele- 
ments joined  the  Cossack  communities  near  the  mouths 
of  the  Don  and  Dnepper,  whence  they  began  a  long 
struggle  against  their  former  oppressors. 

The  end  of  the  dynasty  (1598)  served  these  new 
settlers  as  a  signal  for  a  formal  social  war.  The  pre- 
text of  the  peasants  for  their  offensive  action  was,  first, 
to  defend  the  claims  of  a  "  true  Tsar ; "  i.  e.,  the 
pseudo-son  of  John  IV. ;  second,  to  punish  the  boyars 
for  having  killed  the  imposter.  But  soon  their  own 
real  purpose  and  their  chief  impulse  became  evident :  to 
sweep  away  the  wealthy  and  the  powerful,  the  boyars 
and  the  merchants;  to  make  free  their  personal  serfs, 
and  to  start  a  new  regime  of  Cossack  equality.  At 
least,  such  were  the  promises  they  were  making  in  their 
proclamations  to  the  serfs  of  those  boyars  whom  they 
wished  to  rouse  for  a  general  rebellion. 

Facing  this  position,  the  Muscovite  government 
had  to  decide  between  the  policy  of  defending  both 
peasants  and  serfs  against  their  lords,  and  of  defending 

*  See  p.  7. 


THE  SOCIALISTIC  IDEA  357 

the  lords  against  their  dependents.  Of  course,  it  chose 
the  second  alternative.  It  published  edicts  and  ordered 
measures  to  be  taken  against  the  general  flight  of  peas- 
ants from  their  lords;  and  it  ended  (1648)  by  inscrib- 
ing peasants,  in  a  kind  of  census,  as  the  inseparable 
appurtenance  of  granted  lands.  It  drowned  the  south- 
ern insurrection  in  floods  of  blood,  and  it  gave  the  vil- 
lages of  the  rebels  to  the  free  pillage  of  Tartars. 

This,  however,  did  not  help  the  peasants  to  a  better 
insight  into  the  actual  social  program  of  autocracy.  In 
their  eyes  autocracy  was  still  democratic;  and  they 
clung  to  the  opinion  that  their  only  enemies  were  the 
landlords,  who  were  also  the  enemies  of  autocracy. 
They  now  acquiesced  in  their  new  position  as  glcbae 
ascripti — bondmen  of  the  land.  But  they  found  an 
optimistic  explanation  which  helped  them  to  represent 
their  humiliating  position  as  being  only  temporary. 
The  Tsar  had  no  money,  they  argued,  to  reward  the 
"men  of  service"  by  fixed  appointments;  therefore, 
instead  of  pecuniary  appointments,  he  gave  them  lands 
with  peasants.  Their  idea  was  that,  though  they 
belonged  now  to  the  landlords,  their  land  still  be- 
longed to  them,  and  that  both  they  with  their  land 
and  the  gentry  with  their  military  service  belonged  to 
the  state.  The  time  would  come,  they  were  sure,  when 
the  government  would  find  other  means  of  rewarding 
its  warriors;  and  then  their  ancient  "freedom"  and 
their  ancient  "  lands  "  would  be  restored  to  them. 

One  can  easily  imagine  how  great  their  expecta- 
tions became  when,  after  more  than  a  century  of  patient 
waiting,  the  time  for  the  promises  to  be  fulfilled  had 
arrived.     The  gentry  were  liberated  by  Catherine  II. 


358  RUSSIA  AND  ITS  CRISIS 

from  compulsory  service.  The  peasants  were  sure  that 
now  they  would  immediately  be  given  their  own  "  free- 
dom "  and  their  "  lands."  In  this  firm  belief  they  did 
not  seem  to  notice  that  already  half  a  century  before 
that  time  Peter  the  Great  had  thoroughly  changed  the 
juridical  terms  of  their  slavery  —  terms  to  which  they 
were  so  conscientiously  sticking.  Since  Peter  the 
Great  land  grants  were  to  be  possessed  quite  inde- 
pendently of  any  military  service,  which  everybody  was 
obliged  tO'  perform,  whatever  his  social  station.  So 
that,  when  Catherine  II.  relieved  the  gentry  of  their 
obligation  to  military  service,  their  position  for  the 
first  time  presented  itself  to  the  peasants  in  all  its  horri- 
fying clearness :  they  were  now  unmistakably  serfs  of 
the  landlords  —  their  private  property,  and  not  their 
temporary  servants  and  the  property  of  the  state,  as 
they  had  been  before.^" 

This  seemed  to  them  quite  impossible,  incredible, 
absurd.  Surely  some  "  freedom  "  had  been  prepared 
also  for  them  by  the  empress ;  only,  the  imperial  order 
had  somehow  been  concealed  by  the  "  men  of  service," 
the  common  enemies  of  the  Tsar  and  of  themselves. 

In  a  few  years  this  new  explanation  became  gen- 
eral. The  claims  of  the  peasants  were  embodied  in  a 
new  social  movement,  and  the  chief  of  this  movement, 
Poosfachov,  took  the  name  of  the  assassinated  husband 
of  Catherine,  Peter  III.  He  had  been  deprived  of  the 
throne  by  the  nobles  —  Poogachov  explained  to  the 
peasants  —  just  because  he  wished  to  pay  the  gentry  in 
specie,  and  to  give  the  land  to  the  peasants.  The  mili- 
tary service  had  to  be  made  voluntary,  as  it  was  with 

^"  See  above,  p.  237. 


THE  SOCIALISTIC  IDEA  359 

the  Cossacks;  then  there  would  be  no  need  of  remu- 
nerating noble  "men  of  service"  by  peasant  work  and 
taxes.  These  explanations  and  schemes  squared 
entirely  with  the  people's  political  ideas.  And  though 
the  rebellion  of  Poogachov  was  spreading  only  in  the 
customary  regions  of  peasant  rebellions  —  in  the  bor- 
derlands then  in  process  of  settlement  —  yet  there  was 
in  the  whole  of  Russia  no  single  peasant  who  would  not 
have  liked  to  join  Poogachov  and  help  him  realize  his 
claims. 

Again  the  rebellion  was  stifled  in  blood;  but  the 
peasants  persisted  in  their  view,  which  seemed  to  be  a 
logical  deduction  from  their  whole  history.  Both  the 
social  orders  —  the  lords  and  the  peasants  —  had 
served  the  state;  both  must  be  simultaneously  freed 
from  their  service.  And  there  was  now  no  end  of 
small  insurrections  of  peasants  over  the  whole  country. 
Year  after  year  these  insurrections  and  agrarian 
troubles  repeated  themselves  with  a  regularity  which 
needed  no  Quetelet  or  Buckle  to  explain  their  causes 
constantly  at  work.  There  was  no  mistake  about  it: 
slavery  was  the  reason,  and  slavery  had  to  be  abolished. 
It  was,  as  we  have  seen,  the  threatening  attitude  of  the 
peasants  that  gave  no  rest  to  the  government,  and  fin- 
ally forced  it  to  proceed  to  the  emancipation.^^ 

But  serfdom  was  not  abolished  as  the  peasants 
would  have  had  it.  They  wanted  their  land  simply  to 
be  restored  to  them  without  payment  and  without  any 
diminution  of  lots ;  while,  as  a  matter  of  fact,  they 
were  given  only  a  part  of  the  lands  they  had  been 
accustomed  to  think  their  own,  and  were  obliged  to 

"  See  p.  247. 


36o  RUSSIA  AND  ITS  CRISIS 

pay,  for  such  lots  as  they  received,  heavy  "  redemption 
charges,"  which  sometimes  ate  up  all  their  income. 

Again,  of  course,  it  was  not  the  "true"  freedom. 
The  "true"  freedom  was  concealed  by  the  nobility! 
Disturbances  began  again  in  the  villages.  But  this 
time  a  new  set  of  men  appeared  among  the  peasants  — 
men  who,  taking  the  peasants'  ideas  about  the  com- 
munity of  land  and  about  the  "true"  freedom,  wound 
these  ideas  up  into  a  theory  that  seemed  as  queer  and 
suspicious  as  the  manners  and  deeds  of  these  men 
themselves  were.  They  were  strangers  in  the  village, 
and,  though  some  of  them  tried  to  speak  its  dialect, 
they  betrayed  by  their  habits  that  they  did  not  belong 
to  the  people.  They  spoke  too  well  about  the  "  land;  " 
but  then  they  wanted  the  peasants  to  work  in  common 
and  to  divide  their  collective  produce.  That  was  not 
right.  After  some  hesitation,  the  newcomers  were 
regularly  delivered  to  the  state  authorities,  who  knew 
well  enough  what  they  were.  They  were  "  socialists." 
Some  more  years  passed,  and  these  very  "  sicilists," 
as  the  villagers  called  them,  killed  the  Tsar,  the  same 
Tsar  who  had  liberated  the  peasants.  Now  it  was 
quite  clear  to  the  peasants,  too,  who  they  were,  and 
there  was  no  need  to  call  them  by  a  foreign  name. 
They  simply  were  the  boyars,  the  landlords,  who  were 
avenging  on  the  Tsar  their  class  offense;  the  same 
landlords  who  were  concealing  from  the  people  the 
"true"  freedom. 

After  some  twenty  more  years  had  passed,  this 
situation  completely  changed.  The  strange  men  came 
again  to  the  village,  but  they  were  no  longer  received 
as  strangers.     They  were  now  "Stundents"  —  a  mis- 


THE  SOCIALISTIC  IDEA  361 

nomer  in  which  "Stiindists"  and  "students"  are 
made  one.  "  Stundents  "  are  honorable  personages; 
they  undoubtedly  wish  the  people  well.  And  what 
about  the  Tsar  ?  The  Tsar  is  good,  too,  but  he  ought 
to  be  elected  for  some  three  years,  as  their  village 
aldermen  are. 

These  are,  of  course,  only  some  individual  features 
of  the  new  situation ;  but  the  talk  referred  to  is  of  the 
peasants'  own  invention,  and  it  shows  how  much  the 
popular  thinking  on  politics  has  changed.    The  time  is 
now  past  which  Tourguenev  had  described  in  Nezvly 
Broken  Land.    The  hero  of  this  novel  was  represented 
to  have  been  handed  over  to  the  authorities  by  the  very 
peasants  whom  he  tried  to  convert  to  socialism.     But 
at  present  the  peasants  do  their  best  to  conceal  the 
propagandists    from    the    police,    and,    when    directly 
requested  to  hand  over  seditious  leaflets  distributed  by 
socialists,  they  often  answer  with  plain  refusal.     To 
watch  them  more  closely,  thirty-five  thousand  special 
village  policemen  had  to  be  introduced  by  Mr.  Plehve. 
How  has  this  change  come  about  ?    We  shall  learn 
it  from  the  history  of  the  Russian  socialistic  movement. 
The  origin  of  Russian  socialism  is,  of  all  political 
events  of  the  nineteenth   century,   most   closely  con- 
nected with  the  French  revolution  of  1848;    and  its 
early  theory  is,  of  all  socialistic  doctrines,  most  closely 
connected  with  the  anarchism  of  Proudhon.    This  was 
also  an  era  in  the  history  of  European  socialism.    The 
revolution   of    1848    marks   the    very    moment    when 
European  radicalism  definitely  wound  up  into  social- 
ism proper ;  or,  to  state  it  more  clearly,  when  the  popu- 
lar leaders  first  understood  that  the  interests  of  the 


362  RUSSIA  AND  ITS  CRISIS 

working  "proletariat"  were  irreconcilable  with  the 
interests  of  the  middle  class.  The  French  revolution 
was  the  last  attempt  to  intrust  the  cause  of  the  work- 
ing men  to  the  care  of  the  middle-class  politicians. 
And  the  complete  failure  of  that  attempt  seemed  to 
prove  once  and  forever  that  political  radicalism  was  not 
to  be  trusted  by  the  "masses."  Proudhon's  anarchy 
seemed  to  be  nothing  but  a  further  consistent  inference 
drawn  from  the  same  object-lesson.  The  French  revo- 
lution failed  of  success,  he  argued,  not  because  it  was 
instigated  by  the  middle-class  politicians,  but  because 
it  was  a  political  revolution.  Every  political  revolu- 
tion is  liable  to  be  a  failure,  because  it  does  nothing 
except  change  the  power,  and  every  power  —  even  the 
most  democratic  and  republican  —  is  always  conserva- 
tive. The  existing  economic  order  can  be  changed 
only  when  all  power  is  abolished  and  the  adjustment 
of  the  economic  interests  are  left  to  private  exertion; 
i.  e.,  to  the  direct  mutual  consent  of  the  individual 
members  of  every  commune.  No  "  revolution "  is 
necessary  for  that  change  to  be  accomplished;  or. 
rather,  the  only  revolution  that  is  necessary  is  the  one 
which  is  to  be  brought  about  in  human  minds.  After 
that,  the  existing  economic  order  will  be  naturally  and 
spontaneously  abolished.  "  The  means  that  were  taken 
from  society  by  an  economic  arrangement  will  be  given 
back  to  society  by  dint  of  another  economic  arrange- 
ment." 

This  is,  briefly  stated,  the  doctrine  which  helped 
to  differentiate  the  economic  interests  of  the  working- 
men  from  the  political  radicalism  of  the  middle-class 
politicians,  and  to  draw  a  definite  line  between  political 
revolution  and  social  overthrow. 


THE  SOCIALISTIC  IDEA  363 

How  did  it  react  on  the  minds  of  the  Russian  orig- 
inators of  sociaHsm?  The  two  leaders  of  it  —  Herzen, 
the  powerful  writer  and  deep  thinker,  and  his  friend 
Bakoonin,  the  more  impulsive  of  the  two,  and  for  that 
reason  much  better  known  in  western  Europe  —  were 
just  then  wandering  about  the  continent  and  with  deep 
concern  observing  the  movements  of  European  democ- 
racy. The  two  friends  approached  it  with  a  ready 
determination  to  admire  its  boldest  acts,  and  they  pre- 
dicted for  it  most  amazing  successes.  Instead  of  this, 
however,  they  had  to  witness  its  shortcomings  and  its 
utter  defeat.  In  close  touch  with  Proudhon,  they  drew 
from  the  events  the  same  conclusion  that  he  did,  but 
they  went  farther  than  he  in  the  same  direction.  This 
is  what'Herzen  himself  gave  as  the  explanation  of  that 
bolder  start.    In  one  of  his  pamphlets  he  says : 

A  thinking  Russian  is  the  most  independent  being  in  the 
world.  What,  indeed,  could  stop  him?  Consideration  for  the 
past?  But  what  is  the  starting-point  of  modern  Russian  history 
other  than  an  entire  negation  of  nationalism  and  tradition?  .... 
On  the  other  hand,  the  past  of  the  western  nations  may  well  serve 
us  as  a  lesson  —  but  that  is  all;  we  do  not  think  ourselves  to  be 
the  executors  of  their  historic  will.  We  share  in  your  doubts,  but 
your  beliefs  leave  us  cold.  We  share  in  your  hatred,  but  we  do 
not  understand  your  attachments  for  the  legacies  of  your  ances- 
tors. You  are  constrained  by  scruples,  held  back  by  lateral  con- 
siderations.    We  have  none We  arc  independent,  because 

we  start  a  new  life We  are  independent  because  we  do  not 

possess  anything  —  nothing  to  be  loved.    All  our  recollections  are 

full  of  rancor  and  bitterness We  wear  too  many   fetters 

already  to  be  willing  to  put  on  new  chains What  matter 

for  us,  disinherited  juniors  that  we  are,  your  inherited  duties? 
Can  we,  in  conscience,  be  satisfied  with  your  worn-out  morality, 
which  is  non-Christian  and  non-human,  which  is  invoked  only  in 
rhetorical  exercises  and  in  judicial  sentences?    What  respect  can 


364  ,  RUSSIA  AND  ITS  CRISIS 

we  cherish  for  your  Roman-Gothic  law :  that  huge  building, 
lacking  light  and  fresh  air,  a  building  repaired  in  the  Middle  Ages 
and  painted  over  by  a  manumitted  bourgeoisie?  «...  Do  not 
accuse  us  of  immorality,  on  the  ground  that  we  do  not  respect 
what  is  respected  by  you.     May  be  we  ask  too  much  —  and  we 

shall   not  get   anything May  be   so,   but   still   we   do   not 

despair  of  attaining  what  we  are  striving  for. 

Here,  in  this  pathetic  confidential  statement  by 
Herzen,  we  are  at  the  very  root  of  "  nihilism."  Lack 
of  conventionality  and  tradition  —  which  constituted  a 
feature  of  the  Russian  national  development  ^^  —  was 
transformed  into  a  theory  of  national  superiority  by 
the  generation  to  which  Herzen  belonged.  It  is,  how- 
ever, very  important  to  emphasize  that  "nihilism," 
though  peculiar  to  Russia  as  a  psychological  disposition 
of  mind,  as  a  theory  is  undoubtedly  of  foreign  extrac- 
tion. In  Russia  it  was  only  a  belated  reverberation  of 
a  movement  which  had  had  its  day  in  both  France  and 
Germany.  "  Nihilism  "  borrowed  its  theoretic  expres- 
sion from  St.  Simon  and  from  Ludwig  Feuerbach. 
Individualism  and  collectivism,  materialism  and  meta- 
physics, were  confounded  in  the  doctrine  of  these  pre- 
cursors of  the  modern  view  of  things.  "  Rehabilita- 
tion of  the  flesh"  —  this  designation  characterized,  to 
be  sure,  but  a  part  of  the  new  teaching ;  but  it  pointed 
out  just  what  part  was  considered  at  that  time  prac- 
tically the  most  important.  This  was  a  complete  nega- 
tion of  mediaevalism  in  religion,  morals,  philosophy, 
and  science.  I  hardly  need  to  add  that  this  teaching 
had  nothing  in  common  with  that  practice  of  "  free 
love  "  .to  which  a  Prussian  minister  recently  chose  to 
refer  while  characterizing  the  Russian  "anarchists." 

"  See  chap.  i. 


THE  SOCIALISTIC  IDEA  365 

A  depraved  imagination  has  never  in  the  least  been  a 
fault  of  the  Russian  youth.  While  repudiating  Chris- 
tian asceticism,  they  introduced  a  new  form  of  volun- 
tary asceticism  and  self-sacrifice  which  did  not  lose 
anything  by  being  qualified  in  their  writings  under  the 
name  of  **  utilitarian  morals."  That  is  why  The  Kren- 
tser  Sonata  of  Tolstoy  was  not  written  for  the  Russian 
youth,  and  why  it  failed  conspicuously  to  be  understood 
by  them.  This  was  the  psychology  of  "high  life,"  and 
they  were  democrats  by  conviction.  In  the  next  gen- 
eration they  also  became  democrats  by  birth.  It  was 
particularly  at  that  time  —  i.  c,  twenty  years  after 
Herzen  had  been  reading  St.  Simon  and  Feuerbach  — 
that  the  most  typical  "  nihilism  "  appeared  in  Russia ; 
and  it  is  sufficient  to  read  its  Bible  —  the  novel  What 
to  Do,  by  Mr.  Cherneeschevsky  —  or  the  Memoirs  of 
Sophie  Kovalevsky,  in  order  to  know  what  sort  of 
thing  Russian  "free  love"  was,  and  with  what  chaste 
and  touching  feeling  it  was  really  associated. 

But,  in  accordance  with  the  plan  formulated  at  the 
beginning  of  this  chapter,  we  shall  not  stop  to  consider 
this  side  of  the  movement  —  the  "emancipation  of  the 
flesh"  —  any  more  than  the  emancipation  of  the  other 
sides  of  personality.  Tliis  individualistic  phase  of 
Herzen's  doctrines  was  greatly  emphasized  and  differ- 
entiated by  Mr.  Pissarev,  the  literary  critic  of  the  next 
generation.  We  omit  it  from  our  exposition  and  pass 
on  to  the  other  aspect,  which  is  the  most  important  for 
the  general  development  of  public  life  in  Russia  — 
Herzen's  socialism. 

Here,  as  well  as  in  his  theories  concerning  the 
emancipation  of  personality,  Herzen  was  not  at  all  free 


366  RUSSIA  AND  ITS  CRISIS 

from  the  current  doctrines  of  his  time,  independent  as 
he  might  have  felt  himself  to  be  from  the  European 
tradition.  His  early  impressions  were  connected  with 
Moscow  —  his  birthplace  —  and  with  the  thirties  —  his 
years  of  study.  This  was  the  time,  as  we  have  seen, 
when,  after  the  suppression  of  the  December  conspir- 
acy (1825),  of  political  life  in  Russia  there  was  virtu- 
ally none.  Intellectual  interest  drifted  toward  philo- 
sophical questioning,  and  the  philosophical  nationalism 
of  the  "Slavophils''^^  was  born.  Now,  side  by  side 
with  this  nationalistic  movement  appeared  a  radical 
movement.^  ^  Both  movements  later  on  became  bitterly 
opposed  to  each  other,  and  have  grown  irreconcilable 
since  the  era  of  the  "  Great  Reforms."  But  their 
starting-point  and  their  fundamental  idea  were  the 
same :  the  idea  of  the  people  and  of  the  people's  glori- 
ous destiny  in  the  future.  They  originated  in  the  same 
atmosphere  of  feeling  and  thought,  and  they  developed 
in  the  closest  contact  during  the  quieter  period  of  the 
thirties  and  the  first  half  of  the  forties.  Says  Herzen 
in  his  Mojwirs: 

We  and  the  Slavophils  represented  a  kind  of  two-faced  Janus : 
only  they  looked  backward  and  we  looked  forward.  At  heart  we 
were  one;  and  our  heart  throbbed  equally  for  our  minor  brother, 
the  peasant  —  with  whom  our  mother-country  was  pregnant.  But 
what  for  them  was  a  recollection  of  the  past  was  taken  by  us  as 
a  prophecy  for  the  future. 

It  it  impossible  to  state  in  a  clearer  way  what  were 
the  original  surroundings  in  which  Russian  socialism 
was  born.  It  sprang  from  the  social  stratum  of  the 
highly  educated  and  finely  developed  men  of  the  Rus- 

"  See  p.  52.  "  See  p.  260. 


THE  SOCIALISTIC  IDEA  367 

sian  gentry.  The  peasants  really  were  for  them  their 
"junior  brothers."  Their  feeling  was  all  philanthropy 
and  enthusiasm  for  these  "junior  brothers."  Their 
thought  was  all  anticipation  of  the  people's  great 
destiny  and  glorious  future.  Herzen  and  his  Slavophil 
friends  were  likewise  agreed  as  to  the  main  foundation 
for  this  future  glory  of  the  Russian  people.  They 
found  it  in  the  Russian  rural  commune.  But  their 
ideas  as  to  the  spirit  of  this  rural  institution  ran  wide 
apart.  The  Slavophils  appreciated  the  commune 
chiefly  as  a  national  expression  of  the  Christian  spirit 
—  the  spirit  of  love  and  of  humility.^^  Herzen,  how- 
ever, by  his  university  studies  in  the  natural  sciences, 
and  by  his  later  readings  of  Feuerbach  and  the  younger 
Hegelians,  had  been  brought  to  disbelieve  in  Christian- 
ity and  religion  in  general.  Soon  the  idea  dawned  on 
him  —  particularly  during  his  subsequent  travels  in 
Europe  —  that  the  Russian  commune  was  destined  for 
quite  another  role  in  the  future ;  namely,  that  it  repre- 
sented in  germ  the  socialistic  society. 

The  impressions  which  fixed  the  mind  of  Herzen 
upon  this  idea  were  the  same  as  those  that  influenced 
Proudhon  in  the  framing  of  his  theory.  Similar  nega- 
tive conclusions  were  drawn  by  each  of  them  from  the 
events  of  1848-52  in  France,  which  disappointed  them 
equally  on  the  subject  of  political  revolutions  and 
democratic  radicalism.  In  close  touch  with  Proudhon, 
whom  he  particularly  admired,  Herzen  adopted  also 
his  positive  advices  as  to  the  possible  outcome  for  the 
working  masses.  P>ut  concerning  the  probability  of 
bringing  about  this  result  in  western  Europe  Herzen 

"See  p.  55. 


368  RUSSIA  AND  ITS  CRISIS 

allowed  himself  a  free  course  of  thought.  In  this 
particular  point  he  "shared  in  the  doubts"  of  his 
European  friends,  while  "their  beliefs  left  him  cold." 
He  simply  did  not  believe  in  the  possibility  of  a  social- 
istic overthrow  in  Europe.  Had  it  not  already  been 
foretold  by  his  Muscovite  friends,  the  Slavophils,  that 
nothing  whatever  was  to  be  expected  for  European 
civilization,  and  that  the  only  thing  that  remained  for 
it  to  do  was  to  die  the  natural  death  of  exhaustion? 
Herzen's  personal  observations  —  and  he  was  an 
extraordinarily  keen  observer  —  supported  him  in  his 
opinion  that  no  radical  change  was  to  be  immediately 
expected  in  western  Europe.  And  so  he  was  not 
nearly  so  positive  in  his  anticipations  as  in  his  criticisms 
of  the  existing  state  of  things. 

We  have  now  come  to  a  point  in  the  theory  of 
Herzen  where  the  results  of  keen  observation  are 
closely  interwoven  with  elements  of  hypothesis  and 
of  theoretical  construction.  An  accidental  impression 
received  in  his  youth  seems  to  have  given  him  the 
key  to  his  explanation  of  the  present  and  to  his 
construction  of  the  future  of  European  civilization. 
It  was  not  a  study  in  history  or  in  sociology  nor  a 
philosophical  system,  but  a  picture  and  a  comparison, 
which,  very  early,  converted  him  to  his  system.  He 
found  this  picture  in  a  novel,  Anniuius,  whose  author 
he  even  forgot.  It  was  a  glowing  description  of  the 
ancient  society  of  decaying  Rome,  which  Herzen,  with 
so  many  others  before  and  after  him,  found  most 
astonishingly  like  the  decadent  "society"  of  our  mod- 
ern civilization.  And  as  for  socialism  —  was  that  not 
to  have  the  selfsame  significance  for  this  society  in 


THE  SOCIALISTIC  IDEA  369 

decay  that  Christianity  had  had  for  the  self-conceited 
and  arrogant  civiHzation  of  the  "  Eternal  City  ?  "  Here 
again  numberless  analogies  presented  themselves  to  the 
mind  of  Herzen,  and  he  was  never  tired  of  referring  to 
this  double  contrast :  the  ancient  world  and  Christian- 
ity—  the  new  world  and  socialism. 

But  where  were  the  Barbarians,  to  give  the  ancient 
world  its  coup  de  grace  and  to  start  the  new? 

Here  it  was  that  the  very  realistic  —  not  in  the 
least  mystic  —  disposition  of  Herzen's  mind  yielded  to 
temptation.  As  a  keen  student  of  the  natural  sciences, 
he  was  particularly  anxious  not  to  take  ideas  for  facts 
and  aspirations  for  possibilities.  No  action  without  an 
actor;  no  "abstract  idea"  without  its  embodiment; 
no  "logical  series"  taken  for  "material  series"  —  such 
were  the  chief  principles  of  his  reasoning  in  history  as 
well  as  in  politics.  But  this  very  disposition  played  a 
trick  on  him.  No  Christianity  without  "Barbarians" 
to  back  it  —  was  not  that  principle  applicable  as  well 
to  the  new  Christianity,  to  socialism?  If,  according  to 
the  terminology  of  the  late  disciple  of  Hegel,  western 
Europe  had  "outlived"  its  own  "idea,"  and  thus 
"  gone  out  of  the  circle  of  things  possible  for  her,"  then, 
evidently  some  "  Barbarians  "  were  needed  for  history 
to  be  carried  on.  And  why  should  not  the  function  of 
these  "  Barbarians  "  be  performed  by  a  people  whose 
fundamental  principle  of  material  life  —  the  commune 
—  so  closely  correspond  to  the  prevailing  "  idea "  of 
the  new  Christianity? 

And,  indeed,  was  it  not  the  central  idea  of  Proud- 
honian  anarchism  that  communes  should  appropriate 
the  state  functions  and  perform  them  on  the  principle 


37o'  FU^SIA  AND  ITS  CRISIS 

of  mutual  and  voluntary  agreement?  "The  political 
function"  of  society  would  thus,  according  to  Proud- 
hon's  scheme,  "be  reabsorbed  in  the  industrial,  and  in 
that  case  social  order  would  ensue  spontaneously  out  of 
the  simple  operation  of  barter  and  exchange."  This 
was  the  new  way  shown  to  humanity,  though  unlikely 
to  be  grasped  by  such  portions  of  it  as  lived  all  their 
lives  under  the  law  of  the  state.  Now,  the  Russian 
commune  was  just  the  thing  wanted  to  inaugurate  this 
new  historical  movement.  The  Russian  communes 
had  already  preserved  their  members  from  dealing  with 
the  state  directly  and  from  thus  recognizing  its  laws. 
The  Russian  peasant,  of  course,  always  submitted  to 
the  outward  force  of  the  state  and  its  officials;  but 
he  never  felt  formally  obliged  to  obey  anyone  other 
than  his  own  Mir  and  its  elected  authorities.  The 
Russian  peasant  is  thus,  as  a  member  of  the  village 
community,  a  socialist  (we  should  now  say  a  "com- 
munist") by  birth.  He  needs  only  to  be  allowed  to 
say  his  own  word  ("  word  "  =  .y/o7'6>  in  Slav,  is  sup- 
posed to  be  of  the  same  root  with  the  ethnic  term 
"Slav");  and  this  will  be  the  new  word  which  will 
regenerate  the  civilized  world.  This  is  the  missionary 
work  which  Russia  has  to  do  for  the  blessing  of 
humanity:  to  show  humanity  that  social,  and  not 
political,  revolution  is  what  brings  salvation.  And, 
indeed,  if  a  new  social  order  is  to  come  as  a  result  of 
private  "barter  and  exchange"  carried  on  by  "each 
particular  citizen  and  by  each  particular  commune  and 
corporation"  for  their  proper  use,  then  the  task  of 
bringing  about  a  social  revolution  becomes  quite  easy. 
There  is  no  longer  a  need  of  proceeding  by  the  long, 


THE  SOCIALISTIC  IDEA  371 

roundabout  way  of  political  reform,  of  constitution,  of 
central  representation,  or  even  of  direct  legislation  by 
the  people.  These  methods  of  a  political  delegation  of 
power  —  even  in  its  most  democratic  shape  —  will 
never  lead  to  the  desired  aim.  The  political  form  of 
the  state  is  of  no  consequence ;  the  state  itself  is  to  be 
removed  and  supplanted  by  a  free  federation  of  social- 
istic communes.  Now,  the  Slavs  never  liked  the  state, 
never  even  founded  one  by  their  own  wish  or  resources ; 
their  state  is  foreign  to  them; ^*'  it  shall  be  annihilated 
by  the  very  triumph  of  ethnic  freedom,  and  the  com- 
mune is  already  there,  ready-made,  to  take  its  place. 

Such  were  the  views  and  theories  which  Herzen 
developed  in  a  series  of  articles  during  the  first  two 
years  after  he  left  Russia.  In  1850  he  re-edited  them 
for  the  foreign  public  in  his  books,  From  the  Other 
Shore  and  Letters  from  France  and  Italy  (in  German 
translations).  Owing  to  the  nationalistic  elements 
which  they  contained,  they  could  hardly  have  expected 
to  meet  wath  unmixed  approval.  In  the  eyes  of  a 
European  —  and,  particularly,  a  German  —  reader,  this 
was  Panslavism :  an  appeal  to  the  conquest  of  Europe 
by  the  "  Cossacks ; "  and  the  exaltation  of  the  role  of 
the  Russian  commune  seemed  to  be  identical  with  the 
defense  of  the  serfdom  of  the  peasants.  These  were 
the  reasons  why  Marx  declared  himself  against  Herzen 
without  ever  having  met  him  personally.  We  shall 
soon  observe  some  further  consequences  of  that  feud. 

In  Russia,  however,  the  impression  produced  by 
Herzen's  writings  was  all  the  greater  in  that  he  was 
only  building  on  the  philosophic  foundations  laid  by  his 

"See  p.  55. 


372  RUSSIA  AND  ITS  CRISIS 

own  generation,  and  in  that,  in  his  beautiful  and  ener- 
getic style,  he  advocated  views  and  feelings  already 
very  popular  in  Russian  public  opinion.  The  followers 
of  Herzen  were  recruited  among  such  people  as  had 
already  been  prepared  by  a  Belinsky  in  the  periodical 
press,  and  by  a  Granovsky  from  a  university  chair. 
The  very  fact  that,  in  Herzen's  teaching,  criticism  and 
apprehension  of  coming  evil  prevailed  over  any  definite 
theory  or  positive  program  contributed  much  to  the 
universal  influence  of  the  "  Russian  Voltaire,"  as 
Bakoonin,  one  of  his  best  friends,  called  him.  Soon 
the  influence  of  Herzen  reached  its  climax,  when  the 
bitter  disappointments  of  the  Crimean  War  roused 
public  opinion  in  Russia.  Herzen  then  started  his 
Bell,  the  first  free  utterance  of  political  opinion, 
unhampered  by  the  Russian  censorship,  and  the  influ- 
ence of  which  was  powerfully  supported  by  the  brilliant 
literary  talent  displayed  by  the  editor. 

And  )^et  this  influence  did  not  prove  lasting,  owing 
to  the  same  quality  of  indefiniteness  which  aided  it  in 
its  initial  success.  The  positive  program  formulated 
by  Herzen  consisted  of  only  three  points :  freedom  of 
the  peasants  from  servitude,  freedom  of  the  press  from 
censorship,  and  freedom  of  the  individual  from  cor- 
poral punishment.  With  the  emancipation  of  the 
peasants  by  the  government  the  most  important  point 
of  Herzen's  program  was  realized,  and  the  question 
now  arose,  whether  this  emancipation  ought  to  be 
regarded  as  a  stepping-stone  to  the  realization  of  the 
socialistic  aspirations  proper,  and  what  were  the  means 
most  appropriate  to  bringing  about  that  result.  We 
shall  soon  see  what  answer  the  new  generation  of  Rus- 


THE  SOCIALISTIC  IDEA  373 

sian  socialists  gave  to  that  question.  But  first  we  must 
examine  what  this  new  generation  was,  in  order  the 
better  to  comprehend  why  the  chrection  which  it  took 
was  entirely  different  from  that  of  Herzen,  and  why  he 
finally  fell  behind  the  movement  which  nobody  had 
done  more  to  foster  than  himself. 

Indeed,  we  are  now  —  in  the  era  of  "the  great 
reforms"  —  as  far  as  possible  from  the  beginnings  of 
Russian  socialism  in  the  forties.  The  new  generation 
which  then  appeared  on  the  political  stage  made  quite 
a  new  departure  in  the  intellectual  and  political  life  of 
Russia.  There  is  a  wide  gulf  between  this  generation 
and  its  predecessors.  They  were  discordant  in  every- 
thing—  in  habits  and  views,  in  modes  of  living  and 
methods  of  thinking,  even  in  dress  and  food ;  in  every 
detail  of  social  customs.  Those  who  have  read  Tour- 
guenev's  renowned  novel,  FatJicrs  and  So7is,  know 
well  what  I  am  speaking  about. 

The  action  of  this  novel  arises  from  the  clash 
between  the  two  generations  of  Russians  above  men- 
tioned:  between  the  "fathers"  —  the  "men  of  the 
forties,"  to  whom  the  generation  of  Herzen  and 
Bakoonin,  as  well  as  of  Tourguenev  himself,  belonged 
—  and  the  "  men  of  the  sixties,"  the  "  nihilists  "  proper, 
whose  early  type  was  represented  by  Tourguenev  in  his 
hero,  Bazahrov.  The  novelist  reaped  the  highest 
reward  that  fiction  can  bring:  his  characters  were  dis- 
cussed as  living  persons;  and  for  this  reason  the  dis- 
cussion was  all  the  more  vivid.  Neither  generation 
had  reason  to  find  that  its  respective  representative  was 
not  fairly  treated  by  the  novelist,  while,  as  a  matter  of 
fact,    the    older    generation    had    perhaps    the    better 


374  RUSSIA  AND  ITS  CRISIS 

grounds  for  getting  offended.  Characteristically 
enough,  Tourguenev  vented  his  personal  feeling 
toward  the  younger  generation,  without  at  the  same 
time  refusing  to  give  them  due  credit.  And,  indeed,  it 
was  a  very  complex  feeling  which  he  cherished  for  the 
Russian  youth  of  the  sixties.  To  him  and  his  con- 
temporaries of  the  forties  they  were  entire  strangers; 
he  felt  that  in  their  inmost  hearts  they  were  hostile  to 
his  generation;  he  was  personally  hurt  in  his  amour 
proprc,  as  in  his  aesthetic  sentiment,  by  their  whole 
appearance  and  behavior;  and  yet  he  could  not  help 
feeling  their  inner  force  and  realizing  their  influence 
on  what  was  then  called  "young  Russia."  When  he 
was  asked  to  tell  his  real  feelings  toward  the  hero  of 
his  novel,  Tourguenev  answered  as  follows :  Bazah- 
rov  is 

the  triumph  of  democracy  over  aristocracy If  the  public 

will  not  like  and  appreciate  him  just  as  he  is,  with  all  his  ugliness, 
it  is  my  fault;    it  means  that  I  was  unable  to  master  the  type  I 

have  chosen The  difficulty  was  to  make  him  a  wolf  and  yet 

to  justify  him. 

Tourguenev  had  hit  it.  The  struggle  of  the  two 
generations  was  really  a  struggle  between  aristocracy 
and  democracy  —  between  the  home  breed,  well  fed 
and  fostered,  and  the  gray  wolves  of  the  country  side, 
all  hungry  and  shabby  as  they  were.  Herzen  was, 
with  the  exception  of  his  friend  Bakoonin,  the  most 
advanced  of  the  older  generation;  and  yet  Herzen 
himself,  with  all  his  enthusiasm  for  revolutionary 
ideas,  with  all  his  great  talent  of  observation  and  all 
the  brilliancy  and  elan  of  his  literary  style,  did  not 
escape  being  classified  as  an  old-fashioned  aristocrat  hy 


THE  SOCIALISTIC  IDEA  375 

the  men  of  the  new  generation.  And  he  in  his  turn 
did  not  remain  in  debt;  he  uttered  flame  and  daggers 
in  his  mordant  and  venomous  characterizings  of  the 
new  generation,  and  he  was  as  far  as  possible  from  the 
artistic  equilibrium  of  Tourguenev. 

But  what  was  the  matter  ?  What  was  it  that  roused 
to  such  a  degree  the  demi-godsof  the  older  generation? 

Tourguenev  was  again  right.  It  was  democracy 
in  its  proper  person  that  now  appeared  on  the  scene  in 
life  and  literature,  and  brought  new  criteria,  new  sym- 
pathies and  aversions,  having  nothing  in  common  with 
those  habitual  to  the  generation  of  the  ''  fathers." 

Not  yet  quite  the  democracy,  of  course ;  but  by  all 
means  it  was  a  democracy,  which  was  sometimes  very 
near  to  the  real  one. 

Tourguenev,  Herzen,  Bakoonin,  the  Slavophils  — 
in  short,  all  the  writers  and  publicists  —  had  been  up  to 
this  time,  with  one  or  two  exceptions,  men  of  the 
ancient  gentry.  There  came  now  to  the  foreground 
new  men  —  the  so-called  "men  of  mixed  (/.  c,  lower) 
ranks,"  the  raanochintsee;  and  they  took  the  lead.  A 
nobleman  felt  rather  awkward  in  their  midst.  It  was 
no  fault  of  his,  Herzen  argued,  that  he  was  born  of 
noble  parents  and  educated  accordingly.  He  could  not 
help  being  refined  in  all  his  feelings  and  doings.  But, 
from  the  new  point  of  view,  all  this  was  mere  "  roman- 
ticism," "sestheticism,"  and  ''sentimentality,"  which 
were  to  be  thrown  away  and  supplanted  by  ascetic  sim- 
plicity in  manners  and  "naturalism"  in  theoretical 
views.  And  after  some  few  years  the  advanced  noble- 
man surrendered.  He  grew  ashamed  of  being  a  noble- 
man, and  his  predominant  feeling  became  that  of  a 


376  RUSSIA  AND  ITS  CRISIS 

"repentant."  "Repentant  nobleman"  —  this  was  the 
very  nickname  given  to  this  type  by  the  late  Russian 
critic,  Mihaylovsky.  His  sin  was  the  great  sin  against 
the  people  whom  he  had  held  in  bondage  for  so  long  a 
time,  while  getting  refined  and  enjoying  art  and  higher 
culture  at  the  people's  expense.  He  had  to  pay  the 
people  this  enormous  "  debt "  contracted  by  himself 
and  his  forefathers.  His  atonement  was  to  be  a  self- 
sacrifice  for  the  weal  of  the  people. 

To  be  sure,  a  "gentleman"  w^as  making  now  but  a 
poor  figure  in  literature.  The  real  host  was  the 
raznochincx,  the  son  of  a  priest,  if  not  yet  of  a  peasant. 
His  was  the  best  monthly  in  St.  Petersburg  (the  Con- 
temporary), from  which  Tourguenev  was  soon  rele- 
gated to  Katkov's  Roosky  Vyestnik,  whose  contributor 
he  remained  until  the  moderate  liberal  Vyestnik  Evro- 
pee  was  started  in  1866.  At  the  jours  fixes  of  the 
Contemporary  (Sovreuiennik)  the  uncouth  son  of  a 
priest  —  its  chief  critic,  Cherneeshevsky  —  would 
appear  in  his  long  black  coat  at  the  side  of  Tourguenev 
in  his  fashionable  suit ;  and  the  hostess,  the  democratic 
wife  of  an  aristocratic  editor,  Panayev,  would  ofYer 
Cherneeshevsky  a  simple  porridge,  while  gastronomic 
meals  were  served  for  such  a  connoisseur  as  Tourgue- 
nev. And  the  young  plebeian,  fresh  from  his  under- 
graduate schoolj  would  not  be  in  the  least  abashed  by 
the  presence  of  the  classical  writer;  moreover,  he 
would  commence  some  very  learned  talk  and  would 
cut  short  the  story-telling  of  the  finely  educated  gentle- 
man. He  would  be  annoyingly  self-conscious  and 
bluntly  sure  of  his  opinion ;  not  a  trace  of  the  worldly 
skepticism  or  literary  flimsiness  or  artistic  disguise; 


THE  SOCIALISTIC  IDEA  m 

everything  flat  and  plain,  clear  and  concise  —  and 
desperately  prosaic. 

Facing  such  "sons/'  Herzen  would  not  surrender 
nor  feel  repentant.  The  objections  he  had  against 
them  may  be  reduced  to  three  chief  points. 

First,  they  were  not  so  new  and  original,  these 
"  nihilists "  of  the  sixties,  as  they  pretended  to  be. 
Herzen  claimed  a  share  in  "nihilism"  for  the  preced- 
ing generation  —  that  of  the  "Decembrists,"  that  of 
his  own,  that  of  the  socialists  of  1848,  the  "  Petrashevt- 
see."  In  this  larger  meaning  nihilism  is,  according  to 
him,  "  an  unconditional  surrender  before  experience, 
an  unreserved  acceptance  of  all  the  consequences, 
whatever  they  may  be,  resulting  from  observation  and 
claimed  by  reason."  We  know  that  he  saw  the  root  of 
that  disposition  of  the  Russian  mind  in  its  freedom 
from  all  conventionality  and  tradition.  And  he  was 
right  when  he  claimed  this  priority  of  nihilism  for  the 
former  generations  of  the  Russian  advanced  "intel- 
lectuals." 

In  the  second  place,  what  was  really  new  and  origi- 
nal in  the  particular  nihilism  of  the  sixties  Herzen  pro- 
claimed to  be  nothing  but  a  studied  pose  or  attitude, 
purposely  and  deliberately  assumed  in  order  to  form  a 
contrast  with  that  of  the  previous  generation. 

You  were  hypocrites  —  we  shall  be  cynics ;  you  were  moral 
only  in  your  utterances  —  we  shall  profess  crime ;  you  deferred 
to  your  superiors  and  trampled  upon  your  inferiors  —  we  shall  be 
brusque  to  everybody;  you  bowed  to  the  people,  though  you  did 
not  respect  them  —  we  shall  elbow  and  will  ask  no  pardon;  your 
sense  of  dignity  was  reduced  to  outward  honor  and  convention- 
alities—  our  honor  will  consist  in  contemning  all  decencies  and 
despising  ail  "  points  of  honor." 


378  RUSSIA  AND  ITS  CRISIS 

Here  again  Herzen  was  right  so  far  as  actual  facts 
were  concerned.  But  in  his  wrath  and  anger  he  failed 
to  recognize  the  entire  significance  of  the  fact  — 
pointed  out  by  Tourguenev  —  that  it  was  the  first  form 
of  the  victory  of  democracy  over  aristocracy. 

But  then,  in  the  third  place,  Herzen  did  not  wish  to 
admit  that  it  was  democracy  which  spoke  through  the 
mouth  of  the  new  generation.  They  were,  indeed,  the 
"men  of  mixed  ranks,"  but  not  of  the  rank  of  real 
peasants. 

At  every  word  and  every  move  we  recognize  in  them  the 
servants'   chamber,  the  barracks,  the  scribe's  office,  the  clerical 

seminary Their  systematic   uncourtliness,  their  cross   and 

insolent  way  of  speaking,  have  nothing  in  common  with  the 
inoffensive  and  single-minded  plainness  of  a  peasant,  while  it  has 
very  much  in  common  with  the  ways  of  a  clerk  or  a  "  counter- 
jumper"  or  a  footman.  To  the  real  people  they  were  as  for- 
eigners, representing  the  lowest  stratum  of  their  hostile  camp  — 
the  destitute  idlers,  the  Jacks-at-all-trades,  the  "  alien  "  Russians. 

Even  this  time  Herzen  was  not  entirely  wrong,  and 
—  from  a  purely  sociological  point  of  view  —  his  obser- 
vations were  excellent.  But  he  really  did  not  know 
what  he  was  talking  about;  otherwise,  he  would  not 
have  contested  the  role  of  advocates  of  real  democracy 
in  the  first  beginners  of  the  Russian  "  populist "  litera- 
ture :  a  Pomyalovsky,  a  Leveetov,  not  to  speak  of  a 
Cherneeshevsky  and  a  Dobrolyoobov. 

And  here  it  was  that  Bakoonin  set  in  with  his 
rejoinder.  Of  the  whole  generation  he  was  the  only 
one  who  felt  entitled  to  play  the  part  of  mediator,  and 
he  finally  forsook  his  former  position  to  resume  a  new 
one.  Thus  Bakoonin  forms  a  most  important  link 
between  the  forties  and  the  sixties,  and  transmits  the 


THE  SOCIALISTIC  IDEA  379 

legacy  of  Herzen's  anarchistic  socialism  to  the  first 
Russian  revolutionaries  of  the  sixties. 

In  one  of  his  letters  of  1867  Bakoonin  writes: 
No,  Herzen !  Whatever  the  wrongs  of  the  present  young 
generation  are,  it  is  infinitely  above  your  Katkovs  and  Tour- 
guenevs  —  so  much  above  them  that  in  denouncing  it  these  latter 
only  do  it  greater  honor.  Ten  or  even  five  years  ago,  when  you 
were  looking  forward  and  leading  so  boldly  and  did  not  care  a 
whit  about  what  people  of  short-sighted  reasoning  and  of  semi- 
official opportunism  would  say,  ....  j'ou  would  not  pronounce 
such  frightful  words  —  frightful  for  you  because  they  are  senile. 
....  True,  there  is  much  in  individual  members  of  the  new 
generation,  taken  separately,  that  is  unpleasant,  disorderly,  even 
unclean;  which,  however,  is  very  natural,  since  their  old 
morality,  which  was  founded  upon  religion,  has  been  destroyed 
forever,  and  new  morals  have  been  anticipated  only,  and  are  as 
yet  far  from  being  reconstructed.  All  this  is  doubly  felt  in  the 
milieu  of  our  poor  inexperienced  refugees,  owing  to  that  emigrant 
disease  which  you  have  in  such  masterly  fashion  studied  and 
described  in  your  Memoirs.  But  all  this  must  not  prevent  us 
from  seeing  important  —  nay,  even  great  —  qualities  in  our  young 
generation  —  their  real,  not  artificial  and  not  hothouse-bred,  pas- 
sion for  equality,  justice,  freedom,  and  reason.  Some  ten  of  them 
have  already  been  brought  to  death  by  that  passion,  and  hundreds 
have  taken  the  way  to  Siberia.     There  are  many  braggarts  and 

coiners  of  phrases,  but  also  some  heroes  among  them No, 

you  may  think  as  you  like,  Herzen !  In  my  opinion,  these 
uncouth,  ugly,  and  sometimes  very  vexatious  pioneers  of  a  new 
truth  and  a  new  life  are  a  million  times  higher  than  all  your 
respectable  ghosts. 

And  in  a  long  and  very  remarkable  letter  of  July  19, 
1866  —  which  I  regret  not  to  be  able  to  quote  at  length 
—  Bakoonin  draws  a  line  of  demarkation  between  him- 
self and  Herzen  in  his  last  years ;  which  is,  at  the  same 
time,  the  line  that  separates  peaceful  opposition  from 
revolutionary  movement  in  Russia.     While  objecting 


38o  RUSSIA  AND  ITS  CRISIS 

to  Herzen's  repeatedly  addressing  and  sermonizing  the 
Tsar   (in  his  Bell),  Bakoonin  admits  that  some  few- 
years  ago  he  himself  had  addressed  the  Tsar  with  pro- 
jects for  the  convocation  of  a  Zcmsky  Sohor;  but,  aside 
from  a  general  desire  for  a  constitution/'    which  he 
pleads  as  an  "extenuating  circumstance,"  he  now  pro- 
fesses never  to  have  believed  in  the  possibility  of  a  con- 
stitution.     Every  attempt  at  a  transaction  with   the 
government  and  the  Tsar,  every  hope  for  democratic 
reforms    at    the    hands    of    the    monarchy,    he    now 
denounces  with  the  same  fervor  with  which  "  Bona- 
partist  tendencies"  were  at  that  very  time  prosecuted 
and  exterminated  by  his  European  colleagues  in  the 
"International"  —  by    the    legatees    of    Proudhonian 
anarchism.     He  pleads  for  a  definite  and  fundamental 
separation  of  the  cause  of  socialistic  democracy  from 
any  alliance  with  the  bourgeois  elements.     He  repu- 
diates state  socialism  as  a  disguised  alliance  of  this 
kind;    just  as  he  during  the  same  years  opposed  the 
state  socialism  embodied  in  Marx's  teachings  and  in 
those  of  his  party  in  the  "International."     A  demo- 
cratic Tsar,  representative  of  the  Zemstvo,  is  an  impos- 
sible fiction  —  if  even  this  Tsar  were  Herzen  himself. 
It  is  the  institution  itself  that  is  wrong  and  not  the 
person;   to  abolish  the  institution,  the  state  itself,  and 
not  to  compromise  with  persons  —  this  is  the  only  real, 
the  only  worthy,  aim  of  the  struggle. 

I  know  you  detest  the  word  "  revolution ; "  but  there  is 
nothing  else  to  do;  there  is  no  forward  step  possible  without 
revolution.  In  order  to  be  practical,  you  formulated  an  impos- 
sible theory  about  a  social  overthrow  to  be  accomplished  without 

"  See  p.  278. 


THE  SOCIALISTIC  IDEA  381 

any  political  overthrow.''    But  at  present  it  is  as  impossible  as  a 
political  revolution  without  a  social,  while  both  go  hand  in  hand." 

Perhaps  the  line  here  drawn  was,  as  often  happens, 
clearer  to  the  plaintiff  than  to  the  defendant.  There 
was  no  idea  in  Bakoonin's  reasonings  which  was  not  at 
the  same  time  that  of  Herzen;  and  almost"  always  the 
idea  was  borrowed  by  Bakoonin  from  Herzen's  writ- 
ings—  sometimes  in  his  own  words.  But  Bakoonin 
wished  Herzen  to  be  consistent  and  to  draw  conclusions 
from  his  own  premise's  :  "  Logic  is  the  only  thing  that 
is  powerful,"  he  said.  *'  Let  us  be  logical  and  we  shall 
be  strong,  if  not  for  the  present,  at  least  for  the  future, 
which  may  be  nearer  at  hand  than  seems  to  us."  Now, 
for  Herzen,  besides  his  logic  of  ideas  there  was  also  a 
logic  of  facts;  and  he  was  not  so  sure  to  subject  the 
second  to  the  first;  and  thus  he  accused  Bakoonin  of 
confounding  both  according  to  the  dictates  of  his  tem- 
per. As  for  Herzen  himself,  he  was  now  determined 
"  to  march  only  one  step  in  advance  of  society,  never 
two  steps ;  "  while  Bakoonin  to  the  end  of  his  days  stuck 
to  the  idea  that  the  people  —  of  course,  not  "society" 
—  was  at  any  time  ready  to  embrace  the  last  word  of 
his  own  anarchism  and  to  "  federate  from  below 
upward "  at  the  first  flourish  of  a  revolutionary 
trumpet.^*^ 

To  be  sure,  the  central  idea  of  Bakoonin  —  that  of 
a  coming  overthrow  —  was  already  found  in  the  writ- 

'"  That  was  as  we  know  Proudhon's  theory  ;  see  his  criticism  of 
"  revolution  "  in  his  letter  to  Marx. 

"  This  is  the  position  taken  by  Bakoonin  in  his  struggle  against 
Marx,  accused  of  striving  for  a  political  revolution  alone,  which  was 
looked  upon  as  treason  against  the   workingmen's   interests. 

^' See  his  part  in  the  uprising  of  the  Commune  at  Lyons,   1870. 


382  RUSSIA  AND  ITS  CRISIS 

ings  of  Herzen.  But  it  took  there  the  form  of  a  gloomy 
foreboding,  on  the  part  of  an  observing  historian,  of  a 
universal  cataclysm  looming  up  in  a  future  more  or 
less  remote.  For  Bakoonin  it  was  an  idea,  not  to 
threaten  with,  but  to  be  considered  more  closely  in  the 
light  of  contemporary  events ;  moreover,  it  was  an  aim 
to  be  striven  for.  Thus  from  his  first  appearance  on 
to  be  striven  for. 

Thus  from  his  first  appearance  on  the  political 
stage  in  1848,  we  see  Bakoonin  assuming  this  posi- 
tion. He  then  tried  to  bring  into  action  the  "Bar- 
barians" of  Herzen's  prophecies;  he  was  busy 
bringing  about  a  revolution  among  the  Slavs  of  Aus- 
tria and  Germany,  and  thus  he  laid  a  solid  foundation 
for  Marx's  accusation  against  the  Panslavism  of  him 
and  his  friends.  After  all  this,  he  disappeared  entirely 
for  some  twelve  years,  having  been  arrested,  twice  sen- 
tenced to  death,  and  then  thrown  into  the  St.  Peters- 
burg fortress  on  a  sentence  of  life-imprisonment. 
Eight  years  later,  however,  he  was  exiled  to  Siberia. 
From  Siberia  he  fled  to  America,  whence  he  reappeared 
in  Europe  with  this  same  dream  of  a  Slav  uprising  as 
the  beginning  of,  and  the  signal  for,  a  general  Euro- 
pean cataclysm  (1862).  The  Polish  rebellion  was  then 
in  preparation,  and  Bakoonin  did  his  best  to  connect  it 
with  the  first  revolutionary  attempts  in  Russia,  while 
endeavoring  to  draw  Herzen  also  into  this  desperate 
undertaking,  in  spite  of  the  latter's  internal  conviction 
that  it  was  foredoomed  to  complete  failure.  It  was  his 
share  in  this  rebellion  that  so  disheartened  Herzen  as 
to  make  him  discontinue  his  chosen  line  of  political 
action.     After  having  gone  too  far  to  preserve  the 


THE  SOCIALISTIC  IDEA  383 

allegiance  of  his  former  moderate  friends,  he  now 
shrank  from  going  far  enough  to  gain  the  unreserved 
adherence  of  the  younger  generation.  As  a  conse- 
quence, he  was  forsaken  by  both.  Before  the  end  of 
1863  the  circulation  of  the  Bell  decreased  from  2,500 
to  500  copies.  The  "old  friends"  mostly  became  con- 
servative, and  the  new  friends  were  revolutionary. 
The  former  followed  Katkov  and  Aksakov;  the  latter, 
Bakoonin  and  Cherneeshevsky. 

In  that  critical  moment  Bakoonin  succeeded  in  pre- 
serving his  influence,  and  thus  did  manage  to  outlive 
himself.  He  threw  overboard  his  Slav  dream,  and 
even  temporarily  repudiated  his  belief  in  the  Russian 
commune.  After  some  few  years  of  obscurity,  he 
emerged  again  as  the  organizer  of  a  new  international 
conspiracy  for  attempting  an  immediate  social  revolu- 
tion; and,  absorbed  as  he  was  in  his  struggle  against 
the  social  democratism  of  Marx,  and  in  instigating 
now  and  then  some  local  uprising,  he  succeeded  in 
grasping  two  other  chances  to  influence  the  young 
revolutionary  movement  in  Russia:  Nechayev's  con- 
spiracy and  the  "  go-to-the-people  "  movement  of  1873. 

Thus  it  is  that,  while  speaking  of  Bakoonin,  we  are 
already  so  deep  in  the  Russian  movement  that  we  can- 
not pursue  our  narrative  and  remain  within  the  limits 
of  the  emigrant  literary  propaganda.  To  see  the 
results  of  that  propaganda,  and  to  witness  an  actual 
revolutionary  agitation,  we  must  return  to  the  Russia 
of  the  beginning  of  the  sixties. 

The  ideas  of  socialism  had  for  a  long  time  been  no 
novelty  in  Russia.  When  Herzen,  in  1834.  was  exiled 
from  Moscow  upon  the  accusation  of  holding  to  St. 


384  RUSSIA  AND  ITS  CRISIS 

Simon's  doctrines,  he  was  by  no  means  the  only  one  to 
share  these  doctrines;  he  belonged  to  a  circle  of  uni- 
versity  youths    who    worshiped    the   memory   of   the   ' 
"Decembrist"   conspirators   and   enthusiastically   em- 
braced the  ideas  of  social  reform.     In   1848  another 
circle  of  young  literati,   school-teachers,   and  officers 
was   discovered   by  the  police,   the   "  Petrashevtsee," 
so  called  after  their  leader  Petrashevsky.     They  con- 
templated some  political  activity,  but  meantime  studied 
and  discussed  the  new  productions  of  the  European 
socialistic  literature;    they  planned  the  emancipation 
of  peasants  and  dreamt  of  the  application  of  Fourier's 
falanstcrcs  to  Russia.     Under  the  impression  of  the 
February  revolution  in  France,  they  were  severely  pun- 
ished by  the  government,  and  paid  with  prison  and 
deportation  for  their  mere  talk.    In  another  connection 
we  have  seen  that,   while  averse  to  "politics,"  they 
were  not  unconditionally  hostile  to  the  government; 
and,  indeed,  some  of  them  later  became  nationalists  and 
reactionaries  ( for  instance,  Daneelevsky  and  Dostoyev- 
sky).      Now,   the   generation  of    i860  was  made  of 
entirely  different  stuff.    They,  too,  clung  to  the  idea  of 
a  social,  in  preference  to  a  political,  revolution;    and 
thus  they  also  repudiated  liberalism  for  socialism.    But 
they  spoke  of  the  socialism  of  former  generations  as 
Proudhon  (and  after  him  Marx)  would  speak:    they 
condemned  it  as  Utopian.     And  their  reasons  for  con- 
demning it  were  the  same  as  in  France  in  1848.    Social 
revolution  was  to  be  accomplished,  not  by  philanthropy, 
but  by  the  actual  force  of  such  social  strata  as  were 
personally  interested  in  it.     This  new  turn,  which  the 
accession  of  the  "  proletariat "  had  given  to  European 


THE  SOCIALISTIC  IDEA  385 

socialism,  was  in  Russia  caused  by  the  emancipation  of 
the  peasants. 

And,  indeed,  had  not  Herzen  already,  and  after  him 
Bakoonin,  exalted  the  Russian  peasant  commune  as  a 
prototype,  as  an  organic  cell  or  structural  unit,  of  the 
future  socialistic  reconstruction  of  society?  Was  not 
the  Russian  peasant,  so  to  say,  a  socialist  by  birth, 
being  a  member  of  the  village  commune  ?  Of  course, 
the  Russian  commune  had  not  yet  learned  to  be  quite 
socialistic :  the  members  did  not  work,  nor  did  they  use 
the  product  of  their  work,  in  common.  But  these 
methods  were  to  be  learned  in  a  short  time,  since  the 
commune  already  had  adopted  the  fundamental  prin- 
ciple of  socialism:  collective  ownership  of  the  land  — 
the  chief  instrument  of  production  in  agriculture. 
Agricultural  co-operation  was  confidently  expected  to 
evolve  by  itself,  as  a  result  of  the  coming  ruin  of  the 
isolated  small  farm  and  of  the  triumph  of  farming  on  a 
large  scale  —  which  carried  with  it  the  necessity  of 
using  co-operative  methods. 

Facing  these  bright  prospects,  the  task  to  be  per- 
formed by  the  younger  generation  seemed  to  be  quite 
clear  and  definite.  This  task  was  also  pointed  out  by 
Herzen  and  emphasized  by  Bakoonin.  Russian  social- 
ists did  not  have  to  imitate  the  "  liberators  "  of  Euro- 
pean radicalism  by  starting  a  political  revolution. 
Neither  did  they  have  to  act  as  "utopistic"  socialists, 
by  imposing  upon  the  people  their  own  scheme  of  a 
future  organization.  The  Russian  commune  alone  was 
to  decide  everything  for  the  future  social  order;  the 
only  task  left  to  the  educated  classes  was,  by  the  mere 
work  of  destruction,  to  pave  the  way  for  the  free  action 


386  RUSSIA  AND  ITS  CRISIS 

of  the  people.  It  was  universally  understood  that  the 
old  building  of  the  state  was  to  be  swept  away;  the 
only  doubt  was  as  to  whether  the  people  should  sup- 
plant the  old  state  by  "  federating  from  below  "  in  free 
communes,  or  whether  they  should  send  their  repre- 
sentatives to  an  "  assembly  of  land." 

The  excessive  expectations  to  which  the  possibility 
of  active  participation  by  the  "people"  in  the  move- 
ment planned  by  the  Russian  radicals  of  the  sixties 
gave  rise,  may  seem  childish  and  incomprehensible, 
and,  of  course,  were  chiefly  due  to  their  extreme  lack 
of  experience.  But  the  fact  is  that  not  only  revolution- 
aries indulged  in  these  illusions.  The  Russian  govern- 
ment itself  believed  in  the  possibility  —  if  not  in  the 
success  —  of  an  agrarian  revolution  in  Russia.  The 
explanation  of  that  general  belief  must  thus  be  sought 
in  the  exceptional  circumstances  of  the  time.  The 
excitement  caused  by  the  emancipation  of  the  peasants 
just  then  had  reached  its  climax,  and  a  revolution  was 
being  prepared  in  Poland.  The  general  state  of  mind 
may  be  characterized  by  a  quotation  from  a  contem- 
porary pamphlet,  entitled  The  Great  Russian,  being 
one  of  the  first  productions  of  the  Russian  clandestine 
press  published  within  the  limits  of  the  empire. 

The  pamphlet  suggests  to  the  Russian  intellectuals 
that  they  sign  a  petition  to  the  Tsar  (we  have  seen  that 
there  was  an  epidemic  of  petitions  at  that  particular 
time)  asking  him  to  summon  representatives  of  the 
people  for  the  preparation  of  a  constitution.  Then  the 
pamphlet  proceeds  as  follows: 

We  shall  see  what  impression  our  proposal  will  produce  on 
the  educated  classes.     But  when  we  shall  have  seen  that  they  do 


THE  SOCIALISTIC  IDEA  387 

not  dare  to  act,  then  no  choice  will  be  left :  we  shall  be  obliged  to 
act  upon  the  plain  people,  and  to  them  it  will  be  necessary  to 
talk  another  language  and  to  discuss  different  subjects.  We  can 
not  long  postpone  our  resolution ;  if  the  educated  classes  will  not 
form  a  peaceful  opposition,  one  that  shall  force  the  government 
to  eliminate  the  reasons  for  rebellion  before  the  spring  of  1863, 
the  people  will  rise  in  the  summer  of  that  year.  The  patriots 
will  not  be  able  to  avert  this  rising,  and  their  only  duty  will  be  to 
take  care  that  the  upshot  of  it  shall  be  most  profitable  for  the 
nation. 

What  was  then  to  happen  in  the  spring  of  1863? 
In  order  to  understand  this,  we  must  enter  into  some 
details   regarding  the  emancipation  of  peasants. 

When  in  1857  the  question  of  the  emancipation  of 
the  peasants  was  first  brought  on  the  carpet,  the  Rus- 
sian radicals  —  w^ith  Cherneeshevsky,  the  critic  of  the 
Contemporary,  at  their  head  —  put  forth  two  necessary 
conditions  for  a  profitable  solution  :  ( i )  that  the  peas- 
ants should  be  freed  with  their  landj  and  (2)  that  for 
their  allotments  they  should  be  charged  as  little  as  pos- 
sible, or  not  charged  at  all  —  the  landowners  in  either 
case  to  be  paid  by  the  state.  They  wished  the  redemp- 
tion of  land  to  be  made  obligatory,  on  the  principle  of 
state  expropriation  for  common  utility.  This,  how- 
ever, was  considered  too  radical,  and  the  emancipation 
was  carried  out  on  the  principle  of  voluntary  agree- 
ments between  the  landlords  and  their  tenants.  The 
state  regulated  only  the  minimum  and  maximum  size 
of  allotments  to  be  redeemed  by  the  peasants  in  each 
locality.  Even  this  solution  was  denounced  by  the 
genti-y  as  "  demagogical  "  and  socialistic.^^  As  a  mat- 
ter  of   fact,   the   proprietors   succeeded    in    giving   to 

"  See  p.  266. 


388  RUSSIA  AND  ITS  CRISIS 

peasants  as  little  as  possible,  and  in  charging  for  that 
little  as  much  as  possible.^^ 

The  radical  advocates  of  the  people  did  not  need  to 
wait  for  the  publication  of  the  Emancipation  Act  to  see 
their  hopes  deceived.  Men  of  the  stamp  of  Millyoutin 
' — the  "demagogues"  in  the  government  —  were 
looked  at  by  the  radicals  as  mere  "  trimmers "  and 
office-seekers;  and,  however  much  they  did  to  defeat 
the  claims  of  the  landowners,  they  were  unable  to 
satisfy  the  democrats.  Even  Cherneeshevsky  now 
wished  the  attempt  for  liberation  to  be  postponed, 
rather  than  to  have  it  accomplished  on  the  proposed 
lines.  Meanwhile,  the  draft  of  the  law  was  passing  all 
stages  of  legal  procedure  and  was  converted  into  a  law. 
The  last  and  supreme  tribunal  was  then  the  people 
themselves.    Would  the  people  accept? 

Cherneeshevsky  and  his  party  were  sure  they  would 
not.  The  state  of  mind  of  the  liberated  peasants  seemed 
to  confirm  the  expectation  of  the  radicals.  The  peas- 
ants kept  silence  while  the  law  was  in  preparation,  but 
after  its  promulgation  they  were,  as  has  been  seen,  very 
much  disappointed,  and  the  anticipated  agrarian 
troubles  really  began.     There  was  some  bloodshed. 

It  was  not,  however,  as  yet  the  kind  of  agrarian 
revolution  that  the  radicals  looked  for.  They  explained 
this  delay  in  the  general  rising  by  reference  to  a  special 
clause  of  the  law,  according  to  which  the  former  rela- 
tions between  landlords  and  peasants  were  to  be  kept 
stationary  for  two  years  more.  This  "temporary 
state"  of  things  would  end  in  the  spring  of  1863 ;  and 
so  it  was  that  the  signal   for  the  popular  uprising, 

^  See  pp.  448  f. 


THE  SOCIALISTIC  IDEA  389 

originally  to  be  given  in  1862  on  the  occasion  of  the 
fete  at  the  millennial  anniversary  of  the  Russian  state 
(862-1862),  was  postponed  by  the  radicals  until  1863. 
Meantime,  the  coming  revolution  was  to  be  prepared 
and  helped  along  by  the  educated  classes ;  and  for  this 
reason  the  secret  organization  of  the  "  Great  Russian  " 
was  addressing  to  them  the  above-quoted  lines. 

The  appeal  was  answered  chiefly  by  the  young 
people,  most'  of  them  students  in  higher  institutions  of 
learning.  The  long  series  of  student  uprisings,  never 
interrupted  since  then,  was  inaugurated  in  1861  by 
demonstrations  in  the  universities  of  St.  Petersburg, 
Moscow,  and  Kasan.  Students  of  both  sexes  at  once 
began  a  large  socialistic  propaganda,  addressed  chiefly 
to  men  of  the  lower  classes  :  workingmen,  soldiers,  and 
peasants.  The  best  way  of  meeting  those  people  was 
through  the  popular  school.  Regular  schools  for  the 
lower  classes  had  just  been  established  by  the  Zemst- 
vos ;  but  the  immediate  need  was  supplied  by  numerous 
Sunday  schools  for  adults,  opened  by  young  enthusiasts 
in  the  chief  cities.  Closer  relations  with  the  working- 
people  were  provided  for  by  opening  workshops  of 
various  kinds,  on  the  principle  of  association.  Free 
libraries  were  founded  in  order  to  direct  the  people's 
reading.  Circles  for  self-culture  and  self-help  were 
founded,  in  order  to  promote  the  intellectual  develop- 
ment and  material  well-being  of  the  young  propagan- 
dists themselves.  At  first  there  existed  no  formal 
organization  for  achieving  these  purposes ;  the  general 
enthusiasm  aroused  by  the  emancipation  among  the 
Russian  youth,  and  directed  by  radical  periodicals,  was 
strong  enough  to  lead  the  activity  of  the  young  genera- 


390  RUSSIA  AND  ITS  CRISIS 

tion  into  a  uniform  channel.  But  very  soon  the  most 
active  elements  began  to  combine  and  form  secret  cir- 
cles. Their  early  activity  is  very  little  known,  but  it 
seems  that  their  programs  were  rapidly  progressing  in 
radicalism  and  definiteness.  Constitutional  strivings 
for  a  "Zemskays  Dooma  "  (such  was  the  very  name 
of  one  of  the  secret  societies)  gave  way  to  a  more 
advanced  scheme,  which  we  quoted  from  The  Great 
Russian,  and  this  scheme  again  led  to  the  very  revolu- 
tionary program  of  the  "  Land  and  Liberty"  organiza- 
tion immediately  aiming  at  an  agrarian  uprising.  The 
members  of  that  organization  gave  out  their  numbers 
to  be  some  hundreds  in  St.  Petersburg,  and  about  three 
thousand  in  the  provinces;  but  Herzen,  perhaps 
rightly,  took  these  figures  for  what  they  were  worth  — 
a  mere  "  bluff."  "  Some  first  foundations  of  an  organi- 
zation were  indeed  being  laid  in  Russia,"  he  observed; 
"out  of  these  filaments,  threads,  and  knots  a  solid 
texture  might  have  been  built  with  time  and  silence; 
but,  as  a  matter  of  fact,  no  texture  was  yet  there,  and 
so  every  hard  knock  might  burst  the  warp  and  spoil  the 
whole  work  for  a  generation."  These  apprehensions 
were  loudly  announced  when  the  Polish  revolution- 
aries entered  into  communication  with  the  "  Land  and 
Liberty"  society,  in  order  to  make  it  serve  their  own 
ends.  A  number  of  officers  belonged  to  the  society, 
and  they  promised  to  make  one  with  the  Polish  rebel- 
lion. 

Herzen,  however,  wished  that  the  Polish  leaders 
should  wait  a  while,  until  the  looked-for  Russian 
revolution  should  have  been  started.  But,  in  spite  of 
the  exertions  of  Herzen,  the  Poles  did  not  wish  to  wait. 


THE  SOCIALISTIC  IDEA  391 

They  stated  that  "  the  tendency  of  the  '  Land  and 
Liberty '  society  was  to  spread  their  ideas  among  the 
people  by  means  of  Hterary  and  oral  propaganda,  in 
order  thus  to  attain  their  aim,  were  it  even  after 
decades  of  work."  For  themselves,  they  were  quite 
determined  not  to  wait  so  long  as  that ;  and  they  seem 
to  have  found  sympathy  among  certain  members  of  the 
"Land  and  Liberty"  society  —  at  least  with  Bakoonin, 
who  wanted  an  immediate  rising,  and  so  threw  his 
personal  influence  into  the  balance.  And,  indeed,  next 
year  (1863),  while  Bakoonin  was  leaving  for  his  naval 
expedition  (via  Stockholm),  an  attempt  was  made  in 
Russia  to  raise  a  general  insurrection  of  peasants  in 
the  region  of  the  river  Volga  —  a  place  which  was 
considered  as  particularly  fitted  for  the  agrarian  move- 
ment, because  here  all  former  peasant  rebellions  of  the 
seventeenth  and  eighteenth  centuries  had  taken  place. 
A  proclamation  was  therefore  issued,  taking  the 
form  of  an  imperial  manifesto.  We  have  seen  how  the 
emancipated  peasants  were  convinced  that  such  a  mani- 
festo existed,  but  they  believed  it  to  be  concealed  by  the 
officials  and  the  nobility.  This  manifesto,  which 
reminds  one  very  much  of  those  by  Poogachov,^"'  pro- 
claimed full  freedom  for  the  members  of  all  classes ;  and 
to  the  peasants  it  granted  full  property  rights  to  their 
lands,  without  any  payment.  The  army  was  to  be  dis- 
solved, and  the  soldiers  permitted  to  go  home,  where 
they  were  promised  free  allotments  from  the  state 
lands.  The  capitation  tax  and  conscription  were  pro- 
claimed to  be  abolished ;  district  and  government  offi- 
cials were  to  be  elected  l)y  the  people.    Lastly,  the  popu- 

-■  See  p.  .358. 


392  RUSSIA  AND  ITS  CRISIS 

lation  was  authorized  to  rebel  should  the  local  author- 
ities resist  this  order  of  the  Tsar.  Four  members  of 
the  plot,  all  officers  of  the  army,  journeyed  through  six 
governments,  scattering  copies  of  the  forged  manifesto 
in  the  villages.  At  the  same  time,  four  other  officers 
were  to  raise  a  revolution  in  Kasan,  the  chief  city  of  the 
middle  Volga,  take  possession  of  the  stores  of  arms 
and  gunpowder,  the  treasury,  and  then,  by  the  only 
means  of  locomotion,  the  steamers  on  the  Volga  and 
the  Oka,  establish  communication  with  the  region  of 
propaganda  and  organize  a  people's  army  at  the  remot- 
est corner  of  the  rebellion,  in  the  neighborhood  of  the 
Urals  (at  Perm  and  Vyatka).  The  scheme  was  as 
daring  as  it  was  naive ;  but  the  theoretic  axioms  men- 
tioned above  stood  for  success,  and  the  plan  was 
brought  into  execution  in  connection  with  the  con- 
temporaneous rebellion  in  Poland.  The  propagandists, 
however,  were  caught  by  the  police  within  the  first 
week  of  their  missionary  journey,  and  four  members 
of  the  plot  suffered  for  their  enthusiasm  by  capital 
punishment. 

This  did  not,  however,  stop  the  activity  of  the 
academic  youth  in  the  university  cities  of  Russia,  par- 
ticularly in  Moscow  and  St.  Petersburg.  In  various 
student  circles  the  question  of  social  revolution  in 
Russia  was  eagerly  discussed,  and  generally  the  orators 
took  one  of  two  views,  the  same  as  we  have  seen 
existing  in  the  "Land  and  Liberty"  organization. 
Some  wished  to  attain  their  aim  by  a  gradual  training 
of  the  people  in  the  ideas  of  socialism,  in  order  that 
revolution  might  come  by  itself;  others,  who  thought 
that  no  training  was  needed,  wanted  an  immediate 


THE  SOCIALISTIC  IDEA  393 

revolution,  to  be  brought  on  by  the  educated  advocates 
of  the  people's  interest,  even  by  way  of  violence.^^ 
A  formal  "Organization"  was  formed  (1865)  to  fur- 
ther the  plans  of  the  former  group,  which  formulated 
the  following  program  of  action  : 

(i)  A  propaganda  among  the  peasants,  with  the  nationaliza- 
tion of  land  as  the  leading  principle.  (2)  A  stirring  up  of  the 
peasants  against  the  proprietors,  the  nobility,  and  the  authorities 
in  general.  (3)  The  founding  of  schools,  associations,  and 
workshops  (for  bookbinding,  sewing,  and  so  on),  as  a  means  of 
getting  into  touch  with  the  people.  (4)  Free  libraries,  free 
schools,  and  different  societies  in  the  provinces,  on  the  principle 
of  communism,  as  a  means  of  attracting  and  of  training  new 
members;  all  these  to  be  directed  by  the  central  society  in  Mos- 
cow. (5)  The  spread  of  socialism  among  the  people  through 
school-teachers  and  students  of  theological  seminaries  (secondary 
schools).  (6)  Propaganda  on  the  Volga,  using  the  facilities  of 
river  communication  —  there  being  at  that  time  no  railways  except 
from  St.  Petersburg  to  Moscow. 

Some  of  the  members  of  the  "  Organization  "  wished 
to  go  to  a  different  part  of  Russia  as  early  as  the  spring 
of  1866,  in  order  to  start  a  peaceful  propaganda.  They 
had  no  time,  however,  to  bring  their  plans  into  execu- 
tion, because  they  were  superseded  by  the  other  group, 
ready  to  use  terroristic  means. 

In  the  minds  of  leading  government  officials  there 
existed  a  strong  suspicion  that  some  definite  action 
tending  toward  terrorism  had  been  planned  by  the 
society  after  it  had  received  the  news  of  a  "  Euro- 
pean committee  "  having  for  its  aim  the  killing  of  all 
the  monarchs  in  Europe.     This  absurd  suspicion  may 

'*  Thus  the  two  chief  currents  of  Russian  socialism  appear 
already  in  the  sixties ;  later  on  we  shall  see  the  further  development 
of  each. 


394  RUSSIA  AND  ITS  CRISIS 

have  been  founded  upon  a  real  fact :  namely,  that  one 
of  the  leaders  of  the  group,  the  student  Hoodyakov, 
journeyed  abroad  in  1865  and  made  the  acquaintance 
of  Bakoonin  and  other  refugees.  The  "  European 
committee"  may  have  been  one  of  the  two  "alliances" 
founded  by  Bakoonin  in  Italy  (very  probably  that  of 
the  "International  Brotherhood"),  which  he  himself 
considered  as  the  precursors  of  the  "International." 
At  all  events,  the  attempt  by  one  member  of  the  society, 
Karakozov,  to  assassinate  the  Tsar,  on  April  16,  1866, 
seems  to  have  been  made  entirely  upon  his  personal 
initiative,  without  the  consent,  and  even  against  the 
wish,  of  the  other  members. 

As  a  result  of  that  attempt,  the  society  was  dis- 
covered by  the  government,  thirty-four  members  were 
tried,  and  the  majority  of  them  sent  to  Siberia.  With 
the  officers  mentioned  above,  these  were  the  first  vic- 
tims from  the  new  generation  —  those  whom  Bakoonin 
mentioned  in  his  letter  to  Herzen.^^  But  they  were  by 
no  means  the  last. 

Soon  after  the  trial  of  the  "Organization"  (it  is 
often  called  also  the  "  Circle  of  Eshootin,"  after  one  of 
the  student  leaders)  there  was  a  new  political  trial 
where  the  accused  were  still  more  numerous  —  eighty- 
four.  These  likewise  were,  nearly  all  of  them,  stu- 
dents at  different  higher  institutions  of  learning  in  St. 
Petersburg  and  Moscow.  Their  leader  himself  was  a 
student  and  a  teacher  —  a  man  of  strong  will-power, 
Nechayev.  Bakoonin,  who  thought  for  a  time  that 
here  was  the  man  he  wanted,  characterizes  him  as  a 
person  "with  great  ambition,  reckless  of  himself  and 

^  See  p.  379- 


THE  SOCIALISTIC  IDEA  395 

of  Others ; "  a  man  who  identified  the  revolution  with 
himself,  and  who  therefore  did  not  hesitate  to  betray 
and  to  sacrifice  anybody,  including  Bakoonin,  at  any 
moment,  just  as  he  thought  his  purpose  required;  a 
fanatic,  but  not  merely  "a  commonplace  egotist."  To 
the  enemies  of  Bakoonin  his  alliance  wath  Nechayev 
served  as  a  good  weapon,  by  dint  of  which  Marx 
defeated  him  in  the  International.  What  use  they 
made  of  Nechayev  will  be  easily  understood  from  the 
following  program,  wherein  Nechayev  carries  to  the 
extreme  the  theories  of  Bakoonin  : 

The  only  aim  of  the  society  is  the  complete  liberation  and 
welfare  of  the  people.  But  as  the  society  is  convinced  that  this 
can  be  attained  only  by  a  sweeping  popular  revolution,  it  will  use 
all  possible  means  to  develop  and  spread  such  evils  as  are  liable 
to  exhaust  the  patience  of  the  people  and  necessitate  a  general 
uprising. 

Popular  revolution  is  understood  by  the  society  not  as  a 
regulated  movement  on  the  European  classical  pattern.  This  is 
not  a  movement  that  would  stop  before  property  and  the  traditions 
of  the  social  order;  it  will  not  be  satisfied  by  the  destruction  of  a 
certain  political  form  with  the  single  purpose  of  substituting 
some  other  form  and  of  establishing  the  so-called  revolutionary 
state.  A  revolution  can  be  salutary  for  the  people  only  when  it 
extirpates  all  the  elements  of  the  state,  and  eradicates  all  tradi- 
tion of  state  order  and  all  social  classes  in  Russia. 

The  society,  therefore,  does  not  intend  to  engraft  on  the 
people  any  organization  from  above.  A  future  organization  will 
doubtless  evolve  from  the  popular  movement  and  from  life.  But 
this  is  the  task  of  coming  generations.  Our  own  task  is  a  terrible, 
thorough,  ubiquitous,  and  pitiless  destruction. 

Therefore,  while  approaching  the  people,  we  must  first  and 
foremost  unite  with  such  elements  among  them  as  from  the  times 
of  the  foundation  of  the  Muscovite  state  never  desisted  from  pro- 
test against  everything  connected  with  the  state,  either  directly  or 
indirectly;    against   the   nobility,   against   officialism,   against   the 


396  RUSSIA  AND  ITS  CRISIS 

priesthood,  against  guilds  and  usurers.  Let  us  unite  with  the 
wild  world  of  robbers,  the  only  true  revolutionaries  in  Russia. 
To  consolidate  this  world  into  one  irresistible,  all-crushing 
force  —  this  is  the  whole  of  our  task,  our  organization,  our 
inspiration. 

We  must  add  that  all  these  horrors  were  not  to  be 
relegated  to  a  remote  and  obscure  future.  They  were 
to  be  perpetrated  within  one  year,  namely  in  1869. 

In  May,  1869,  the  activity  of  the  best  men  must  be  concen- 
trated in  Petersburg  and,  Moscow,  as  well  as  in  other  university 
towns.  During  this  period  a  protest  must  be  prepared  and  car- 
ried into  effect  in  the  higher  institutions  of  learning,  claiming  the 
right  of  meeting.  From  May  onward  the  activity  must  be  trans- 
ferred to  the  provincial  and  district  cities,  and  chiefly  concentrated 
among  the  lower  middle  class,  theological  students,  etc.  From 
October  onward  the  propaganda  must  be  carried  on  among  the 
people  by  the  united  strength  of  the  provincial  and  St.  Peters- 
burg members. 

Lastly,  on  February  19,  1870,  the  anniversary  of  the 
emancipation,  the  social  revolution  was  to  break  out. 
At  that  date  the  remaining  obligations  of  the  peasants 
toward  their  former  landlords  would  expire  according 
to  the  emancipation  law,  and  the  mass  of  the  people 
would  rise  by  their  own  initiative.  The  society  must 
be  there  ready  to  help;  and  its  help  would  consist  in 
destroying  everything  and  everybody  that  might  jeop- 
ardize the  success  of  a  spontaneous  popular  revolution 
(the  supposed  enemies  of  the  revolution  were  called  the 
"imperial  party").  Meantime,  toward  the  middle  of 
1869,  Nechayev  went  abroad,  and,  upon  his  assertion 
that  everything  was  ready  for  a  revolution  in  Russia, 
received,  through  the  intermediacy  of  Bakoonin,  a  fund 
deposited  with  Herzen  by  a  Russian  emigrant  for 
revolutionary  purposes.    In  September  he  returned  and 


THE  SOCIALISTIC  IDEA  397 

organized,  among  its  few  followers,  a  Russian  branch 
of  the  "  International."  In  the  last  days  of  November 
he  forced  his  disciples,  under  the  hypnotism  of  his 
strong  will,  to  kill  one  of  their  colleagues,  Ivanov,  the 
only  one  who  resisted  the  moral  influence  of  the  leader. 
For  this  murder  the  members  of  the  circle  were 
arrested.  Nechayev  fled  to  Switzerland,  from  where, 
after  some  two  years,  he  was  extradited  by  the  Swiss 
government  as  a  common  criminal. 

Thus  ended  the  revolutionary  movement  in  the 
sixties.  The  revolutionaries  of  that  decade  played  a 
great  game,  and  staked  their  lives  upon  one  throw  of 
the  die;  but  the  game  was  dangerous  only  to  them- 
selves. The  contrast  between  reality  and  their  appre- 
ciation of  it  was  so  great  and  so  obvious  that  only  their 
youthful  inexperience,  their  enthusiasm,  and  their 
theories  concerning  the  "  innate  "  socialism  of  the  Rus- 
sian peasant  and  his  readiness  for  the  social  revolution 
could  help  them  to  bridge  the  gap.  The  Russian  revo- 
lution was  as  yet  in  its  swaddling-clothes.  It  was, 
however,  born;  and  presently  we  shall  study  its 
growth.  At  all  events,  its  prehistoric  period  came  to 
its  close  with  the  plot  of  Nachayev. 

The  "inexperience"  and  the  "enthusiasm,"  to  be 
sure,  were  destined  to  linger  in  the  following  period. 
But  the  "axioms"  were,  later  on,  superseded.  The  very 
exaggeration  of  Bakoonin's  anarchism  in  Nechayev's 
program,  by  way  of  reaction,  made  all  further 
movements  somewhat  more  socialistic.  Nechayev's 
program  was  imposed  on  his  disciples  only  by  tlie 
strength  of  his  personality.  Their  depositions  during 
their  trial  show  that  many  of  them  cherished  quite 


398  RUSSIA  AND  ITS  CRISIS 

different  views  as  to  the  progress  of  the  Russian  revo- 
lution. We  have  seen  these  moderate  views  to  be 
present  already  in  the  secret  organizations  of  1862-63 
and  1865.  Now,  with  the  failure  of  Nechayev's  enter- 
prise, these  undercurrents  rose  to  the  surface  in  the 
form  of  new  theories. 

The  naive  belief  that  the  social  revolution  was  to 
be  immediately  achieved  by  the  people  themselves,  and 
that  nothing  but  "  clearing  the  way "  was  expected 
from  the  educated  class,  did  not  stand  the  test.  New 
theories  had  now  to  be  tried,  therefore,  taking  for  their 
starting-point  either  the  people  or  the  e'ducated  classes. 
The  former  movement  is  connected  with  the  name  of 
Lavrov ;  the  latter  is  known  as  that  of  Tkachov.  Both 
endeavored  to  solve  the  problem  imposed  by  the  failure 
of  Bakoonin's  anarchism  and  Nechayev's  Jacobinism. 
Both  agree,  as  the  result  of  the  dismal  experience  of 
the  sixties,  that  social  revolution  is  impossible  at  pres- 
ent. But  they  lay  stress  on  different  parts  of  this  con- 
clusion. "  Social  revolution  is  impossible,"  Lavrov 
says ;  "  let  us  then  make  a  social  propaganda."  "  No," 
Tkachov  retorts;  "social  revolution  is  impossible;  let 
us  then  make  a  political  revolution." 

Different  as  these  points  of  view  may  seem,  it  is  not 
difficult  to  recognize  in  both  the  powerful  influence  of 
Marx  —  Bakoonin's  uncompromising  enemy.  Proud- 
hon's  influence  was  now  upon  the  wane,  Marx's  theory 
was  to  take  its  place  in  the  minds  of  the  leading  revolu- 
tionaries. 

With  the  ascendancy  of  Marx's  theory,  its  twt) 
central  ideas,  which  had  met  with  such  strong  opposi- 
tion from  Bakoonin,  were  accepted.    The  first  idea  was 


THE  SOCIALISTIC  IDEA  399 

that  the  new  order  of  things  is  to  evolve  from  far  more 
powerful  springs  than  an}-  secret  conspiracy  can  con- 
trol, being  rooted  deeply  in  the  very  development  of  the 
present  capitalistic  order ;  and  the  second  idea,  that  the 
overthrow  is  to  be  accomplished  by  means  of  political 
power  previously  appropriated  by  the  workingmen; 
and  thus  political  reform  is  to  precede  economical  and 
social.  But,  as  the  former  idea  was  as  yet  too  new 
to  be  grasped  and  fully  understood  at  once,  and  the 
second  idea  until  then  had  been  considered  a  most  dan- 
gerous heresy,  "  Marxism  "  could  not  be  accepted  in  its 
full  significance.  Instead,  different  elements  of  Marx's 
theory  were  borrowed  by  two  opposing  doctrines  and 
developed  in  a  way  which  made  both  one-sided  and 
irreconcilable.  The  idea  of  a  political  overthrow  pre- 
vious to  the  social  revolution  was  framed  into  a  new 
variation  of  the  old  "  Jacobinism  "  by  Tkachov.  The 
idea  of  a  spontaneous  development  of  a  new  social 
order  was  appropriated  by  Lavrov,  but  strangely  inter- 
mixed with  the  still  prevailing  "  Bakoonism "  of  the 
current  "populist"  doctrine.  Of  course,  Lavrov  was 
opposing  Bakoonin,  but  the  result  of  his  opposition  was 
to  make  of  his  own  doctrine  a  sort  of  compromise 
between  current  opinions  and  the  more  daring  criti- 
cism of  Tkachov;  though,  as  time  went  on,  he  was 
forced  in  larger  measure  to  accept  the  opinions  of  the 
latter. 

Tkachov,  who  in  the  sixties  had  been  one  of 
Nechayev's  circle,  still  thought  that  a  revolution  was  to 
be  brought  about  "now  if  ever."  He  shared  Cher- 
neeshevsky's  apprehension  of  the  growth  of  capitalism 
in  Russia,  and  he  thought  the  only  means  of  preventing 


400  RUSSIA  AND  ITS  CRISIS 

it  was  to  overthrow  the  government  by  means  of  a  con- 
spiracy and  to  inaugurate  a  new  era  of  social  reform 
from  above.  But  "  that  is  the  way  of  poHtical  revolu- 
tion, which  relegates  to  the  second  plane  the  aims  of 
the  people,  the  task  of  socialism,"  Lavrov  rejoined. 
And  he  solemnly  asked  the  growing  generation  of  Rus- 
sian youth 

whether  they  would  like  to  follow  the  same  path  as  those  con- 
stitutionalists who  also  may  form  a  conspiracy  in  order  to  limit 
the  imperial  power  by  an  all-Russian  representative  assembly, 
requesting  nothing  but  liberal  checks  and  guaranties ;  or  whether 
they  forgot  that  the  people  were  always  cheated  whenever  an 
alliance  between  the  popular  party  and  the  bourgeoisie  was  con- 
cluded ;  or  whether  they  thought  that  there  was  anything  in  com- 
mon between  a  social  revolution  and  a  revolution  for  a  liberal 
constitution?  No  [he  proceeded  to  answer  his  own  question]  ; 
whether  the  time  has  or  has  not  come  for  a  revolution ;  whether 
this  time  comes  before  a  bourgeoisie  shall  have  been  formed  in 
Russia,  or  after  that  time  ^^  .  .  .  .  the  revolution  we  look  for  must 
be  popular  and  social ;  it  must  be  directed  not  only  against  the 
government,  and  its  aim  must  be  not  only  to  deposit  the  power 
in  some  other  hands,  but  it  must  at  once  overthrow  the  economic 
foundations  of  the  present  social  order. 

And,  for  fear  of  a  "  Blanquist "  overthrow,  Lavrov 
shrank  back  to  the  initial  assertions  of  pure  anarchism. 
"  The  state  power,  with  whomsoever  it  rests,  is  hostile 
to  the  socialistic  state  of  things,"  and  "only  such  per- 
sons may  become  members  of  the  socialistic  organiza- 
tion as  will  fight  against  the  government  with  a  view  to 
facilitating  the  popular  uprising,  in  order  that  the  state 
may  be  directly  transformed  into  an  autocracy  of  popu- 
lar  communes,   popular   gatherings,   popular   bands." 

^'  A   possibility   which,    according   to    Lavrov,   had   been   demon- 
strated by  western  Europe. 


THE  SOCIALISTIC  IDEA  401 

The  mere  idea  of  "centralism"  was  abhorred  by  that 
generation;  "federaHsm,"  which  Tkachov  thought  to 
be  a  Utopia,  still  prevailed  among  them. 

And  yet,  while  clinging  to  the  old  errors  of  doctrine, 
Lavrov  could  not  possibly  cling  to  the  former  errors  of 
revolutionary  practice.  His  previous  activity,  as  pro- 
fessor and  writer  on  sociology,  pre\'ented  him  from 
being  too  sanguine  on  the  subject  of  a  Russian  revolu- 
tion. He  could  not  possibly  think  that  the  only  task  of 
the  Russian  revolutionaries  was  to  proceed  to  the 
immediate  extirpation  of  the  "  imperial  party,"  and  to 
the  general  destruction  of  existing  institutions.  To 
"secure"  the  victory,  a  long  period  of  "preparation" 
and  training  had  first  to  be  traversed,  and  it  was  not 
fair,  according  to  Lavrov,  to  call  the  plain  people  out 
upon  the  barricades  to  risk  their  lives  at  random.  If 
it  were  true  that  whatever  was  to  be  changed  had  to  be 
changed  by  the  people  themselves,  then  the  people  must 
first  learn  to  change  themselves;  they  had  yet  to  be 
made  socialistic,  since  it  had  been  proved  by  experience 
that  they  were  not  what  they  were  expected  to  be  — 
socialists  by  birth.  Now,  these  views  resulted  in  a 
complete  change  of  opinion  as  to  the  role  of  the  "  intel- 
lectuals"—  namely,  the  socialistic  youth  —  in  the  com- 
ing revolution.  Their  role  was  no  longer  to  be  confined 
to  a  few  months  of  introductory  agitation  or  to  the 
mere  process  of  "clearing  the  way"  for  the  impending 
outbreak.  They  had  to  come  into  closer  and  more  sys- 
tematic contact  with  the  people  themselves,  instead  of 
working  among  the  educated  classes  or  undermining 
the  ruling  social  strata.  And  first  they  had  to  study 
deeply  all  about  that  "Great  Unknown,"  the  people; 


402  RUSSIA  AND  ITS  CRISIS 

they  were  to  learn  from  them  who  they  were,  in  order 
better  to  perform  the  subsequnt  task  of  teaching  them 
what  they  already  knew  themselves  —  the  social  ideals 
of  the  future. 

Subsequent  experience  made  Lavrov  modify  his 
theory  by  introducing  such  elements  of  "centralism" 
as  at  first  he  had  stubbornly  repudiated.  He  at  length 
came  to  understand  that  a  closer  organization  and  a 
stricter  discipline  are  necessary  for  any  revolutionary 
organization  than  were  consistent  with  the  current 
theory  of  "  federalism."  He  even  admitted  that,  so  far 
from  destroying  the  state,  it  would  be  necessary  to  pre- 
serve it,  even  "the  other  day  of  the  revolution;"  and 
he  postponed  indefinitely  the  anarchist  reduction  of  the 
state  to  naught.  But  all  these  concessions  to  the  hated 
"  centralism  "  were  so  many  heresies,  not  to  be  justified 
even  by  the  theory  of  the  state  as  a  "necessary  evil," 
which  Lavrov  now  resorted  to.  In  fact,  Lavrov  again 
reflected  in  his  periodical,  the  Forward,  what  w-as 
really  the  new  and  current  doctrine  of  the  day.  And 
thus  we  must  look  to  the  actual  revolutionary  events  in 
order  to  understand  how  this  gradual  change  in  Lav- 
rov's  views  had  come  to  pass. 

A  sort  of  idyllic  prologue  to  the  thrilling  drama  of 
the  Russian  revolution  of  the  next  decade  was  acted  in 
1872-73  at  Zurich.  There  the  Russian  youth  —  par- 
ticularly the  girls  —  gathered  in  large  numbers,  owing 
to  the  difficulties  of  study  in  the  Russian  universi- 
ties and  the  entire  impossibility  of  women  securing  in 
Russia  a  higher  education.  The  two  chief  leaders  of 
revolutionary  thought  —  Lavrov  and  Bakoonin  —  also 
came  to  Zurich ;   and  an  animated  exchange  of  \'iews 


THE  SOCIALISTIC  IDEA  403 

took  place,  followed  by  publications  which  extended 
the  discussions  to  the  Russian  universities  as  early  as 
the  autumn  of  1873.  Lavrov  here  defended  his  thesis 
that  a  previous  training  for  revolutionists  and  a  pre- 
paratory propaganda  among  the  people  were  necessary. 
This  thesis  was  vividly  discussed,  but  mostly  repudiated 
by  the  enthusiastic  youth,  all  too  impatient  to  get  at  the 
main  work  of  making  a  social  revolution.  The  experi- 
ence of  the  former  generation  did  not  exist  for  them, 
and  mere  theories  could  have  no  influence  upon  them. 
To  Lavrov's  assertions  that,  as  the  social  revolution 
was  to  be  achieved  by  the  village  communes,  it  must 
come  as  a  result  of  a  thorough  propaganda  in  these 
communes,  and  not  as  a  result  of  immediate  popular 
riots,  founded  on  the  supposition  that  the  Russian 
people  were  already  socialistic,  the  "  Bakoonists " 
retorted  that  "  riots  "  too  were  one  of  the  best  means 
of  propaganda  —  and  they  thought  them  to  be  the  best 
introduction  to  a  general  revolution.  At  any  rate,  one 
central  idea  was  out  of  the  question ;  namely,  that  the 
revolutionaries  had  to  work  among  the  people,  and  that 
for  that  purpose  they  had  to  learn  to  know  the  people 
better.  They  had  to  "go  to  the  people,"  whether  they 
intended  to  organize  ''riots"  or  to  make  a  peaceful 
propaganda  of  socialism ;  whether  they  were  "  Bakoon- 
ists" or  "Lavrists."  Even  the  few  who  were 
"Jacobins,"  with  Tkachov,  made  no  exception. 

In  harmony  with  the  views  of  the  "anarchistic" 
and  "  federalistic "  elements  among  the  adherents  of 
the  theory,  there  existed  no  central  organization  for 
the  movement.  The  movement  was,  as  had  been  the 
case  ten  years  before,  quite  spontaneous.     Its  nucleus 


404  RUSSIA  AND  ITS  CRISIS 

was  formed  out  of  isolated  circles,  scattered  over  the 
whole  of  Russia.  These  circles  of  intimate  friends  had 
been  in  existence  for  some  time  when  the  movement 
began,  and  they  had  in  different  ways  promoted  the 
socialistic  propaganda.  The  Petersburg  circle  of 
"  Chaikovtsee,"  for  instance,  began  with  providing  use- 
ful books  for  home  reading  and  self-culture.  The 
Moscow  circle  of  Dolgooshin  attempted  to  found  a 
secret  press  and  to  distribute  leaflets  among  occasional 
acquaintances  from  the  people.  The  southern  circles 
of  Odessa  and  Keeyev  were  from  the  beginning  more 
radical,  and  they  were  the  first  (1871)  to  try  direct 
agitation  among  the  workingmen  in  the  factories.  This 
method  was,  however,  very  soon  (1872-73)  adopted 
also  by  the  Petersburg  revolutionary  youth,  and,  some 
few  years  later  (1874-75)  by  the  Moscow  circle  of 
friends  just  returned  from  Zurich.  This  isolated 
activity  was  now  turned  into  one  channel  of  the  "  going 
to  the  people"  movement  of  1873-74. 

The  Memoirs  of  a  Rei'ohifionisf,  by  Peter  Kropot- 
kin,  reveal  the  fact  that  some  organizing  work  had  been 
going  on  in  the  winter  of  1873-74,  preparatory  to  the 
renowned  crusade  of  the  summer  of  1874.  Kropotkin, 
Stepnyak, 'and  some  other  members  of  the  "Chaikovt- 
see "  circle  had  a  large  share  in  the  preparatory  activity 
of  establishing  communications  between  the  St.  Peters- 
burg circle  and  the  provincial  organizations  mentioned 
above :  the  writing  of  leaflets  for  the  people ;  the  print- 
ing of  them  abroad  and  the  smuggling  of  them  in ;  the 
conducting  of  a  large  correspondence  with  a  hundred 
centers  spread  over  thirty-eight  provinces  of  European 
Russia;   and  at  the  same  time  the  carrying  on  of  an 


THE  SOCIALISTIC  IDEA  405 

extensive  propaganda  among  the  St.  Petersburg  work- 
ingmen  meeting  in  four  different  branches.  Kropotkin 
also  wrote  a  memoir  formulating  the  leading  prin- 
ciples of  the  new  movement.  Social  revolution  —  /.  e., 
the  overthrow  of  the  existing  social  and  economic  state 
institutions  —  was  kept  in  view  as  the  only  possible  aim 
of  Russian  revolutionary  socialism.  Propaganda 
among  the  peasants  and  workingmen  was  held  to  be 
the  best  means  of  preparing  such  a  revolution.  Only 
such  youths  as  had  severed  all  connection  with  the  life 
of  the  educated  class  —  not  only  theoretically,  but  prac- 
tically, by  repudiating  all  the  habits  of  educated  life 
and  casting  their  lot  with  the  working-people  —  only 
such  were  regarded  as  fitted  for  carrying  out  the  propa- 
ganda. Local  "  riots  "  were  acknowledged  to  have  only 
"educational"  significance,  and  people  were  dissuaded 
from  organizing  them  for  fear  of  losing  sight  of  their 
chief  aim,  which  was  the  general  uprising.  For  all 
these  purposes  an  organization  was  considered  neces- 
sary; but  it  was  to  be  founded  on  the  strictly  "  federal- 
istic  "  principle  of  equality  of  members  and  publicity  of 
procedure,  with  absolute  exclusion  of  everything  like 
Nechayev's  methods  —  of  all  subjection,  deceit,  and 
violence.  No  existing  secret  organization  (including 
the  International  Association  of  Workingmen)  was  to 
be  taken  in,  since  it  was  held  that  the  Russian  revolu- 
tionary party  had  to  develop  spontaneously  amid  the 
Russian  people  themselves. 

With  so  little  of  preparation  and  so  loose  an  organi- 
zation a  widespread  movement  was  started.  One  of  its 
leading  men  —  Stepnyak  —  says  : 

Nothing  similar  has  been   seen  before  or  since.     It   was   a 


4o6  RUSSIA  AND  ITS  CRISIS 

revelation  rather  than  a  propaganda.  At  first  the  book,  or  the 
individual,  that  had  impelled  this  or  that  person  to  join  the  move- 
ment could  be  traced  out;  but  after  a  while  this  became  impos- 
sible. It  was  a  powerful  cry,  which  arose,  no  one  knew  where  and 
whence,  and  which  summoned  the  zealous  to  the  great  work  of 
the  redemption  of  country  and  humanity.  And  the  zealous, 
heeding  this  cry,  arose,  overwhelmed  with  sorrow  and  indignation 
over  their  past  life,  and,  abandoning  home  and  family,  wealth 
and  honors,  threw  themselves  into  the  movement  with  a  joy,  an 
enthusiasm,  a  faith,  such  as  are  experienced  only  once  in  a  life- 
time, and  which  when  lost  are  never  found  again. 

I  will  not  speak  of  the  many  young  men  and  young  women 
of  the  highest  aristocratic  families  who  labored  fifteen  hours  a 
day  in  the  factories,  in  the  workshops,  in  the  fields.  Youth  is 
proverbially  generous  and  ready  for  sacrifice.  The  most  char- 
acteristic feature  of  the  movement  was  that  the  contagion  spread 
even  to  the  people,  advanced  in  years,  who  had  already  a  future 
clearly  worked  out  and  a  position  won  by  the  sweat  of  their  brows 
—  judges,  physicians,  officers,  officials  —  and  these  were  not 
among  the  least  zealous. 

Yet  it  was  not  a  political  movement.  It  rather  resembled  a 
religious  movement,  and  had  all  the  contagious  and  absorbing 
elements  of  such  a  one.  People  not  only  sought  to  obtain  a  dis- 
tinct practical  object,  but  also  to  satisfy  an  inward  sentiment  of 
duty,  an  inspiration,  so  to  speak,  leading  them  toward  their  own 
moral  perfection. 

With  the  spring  of  1874  all  discussion  abruptly  ceased  among 
the  circles  of  the  revolutionary  youth.  The  time  for  talking  was 
over :  actual  "  work "  was  in  contemplation.  The  working- 
people's  gear  —  boots,  shirts,  etc.  —  were  hurriedly  being  prepared. 
Short  greetings  and  laconic  answers  were  heard:  "Whither?"  — 
"  To  the  Urals,"  "  To  the  Volga,"  "  To  the  South,"  "  To  the  river 

of  Don,"  and  so  on There  were  warm  wishes  for  success, 

and  robust  squeezings  of  hands "The  spring  is  ending;    it 

is  high  time."  ....  And  so,  like  an  electric  spark,  that  cry  "  to  the 
people  "  ran  through  the  youth ;  sure  of  themselves,  daring  and 
wide-awake,  though  unarmed  and  unorganized,  they  dashed  in 
full  sight  of  the  enemy,  into  the  storm. 


THE  SOCIALISTIC  IDEA  407 

The  number  of  these  propagandists  which  became 
known  to  the  pohce  was  from  one  to  two  thousand; 
the  number  of  sympathizers  and  helpers  was  many 
times  larger.  The  aims  and  means  of  by  far  the  great- 
est number  of  them,  however,  were  uncertain  and 
floating.  They  expected  everything  to  become  clear 
at  the  first  contact  with  that  people  with  whom  they 
were  longing  to  "  melt  into  one."  They  were  fully 
aware  of  their  utter  ignorance  of  the  Russian  peasants, 
and  they  approached  them  with  feelings  of  deference 
and  humility.  They  expected  to  be  taught  and  enlight- 
ened by  the  people  themselves  —  to  learn  the  people's 
wisdom,  rather  than  to  teach  them  their  own  knowl- 
edge. It  was  not  at  all  the  necessity  of  concealing 
themselves  from  the  police  that  caused  them  to  appear 
among  the  peasants  in  peasant  attire.  They  thought 
this  the  best  way  to  be  understood  and  to  win  the  con- 
fidence of  the  people.  And,  besides,  they  were  much 
afraid  of  being  taken  for  the  people's  enemies,  the 
"  landlords."  Their  disguise  was  thus  as  much  a  means 
of  propaganda  as  a  moral  necessity.  Tliey  even  pre- 
ferred to  dress  as  the  lowest  among  the  villagers,  in 
order  to  look  like  tramps  and  paupers,  and  they  some- 
times professed  to  be  illiterate. 

Under  these  conditions,  the  result  of  the  first  con- 
tact of  the  propagandists  with  the  people  proved  a 
bitter  disappointment  both  to  the  peasants  and  to  them- 
selves. Of  course,  the  peasants  were  not  satisfied  with 
the  conditions  of  their  emancipation ;  they  looked  for  a 
"new  freedom."  But  they  did  not  think  of  fighting 
for  it ;  rather,  they  patiently  expected  the  new  freedom 
to  be  given  at  some  future  time  by  the  T.sar  himself. 


4o8  RUSSIA  AND  ITS  CRISIS 

when  at  last  "  he  should  know  the  truth  "  about  them 
and  about  the  noblemen's  concealing  from  the  people 
their  "  freedom."  To  be  sure,  they  cherished  the  hope 
of  a  general  partition  of  the  land;  and  they  eagerly 
listened  to  a  propagandist  as  long  as  he  would  talk 
about  the  "land."  But  as  soon  as  he  began  speaking 
about  socialism  proper,  they  listened  to  his  talk  as 
something  of  no-  concern  to  themselves,  and  simply  did 
not  understand.  All  their  strivings  were  rather  indi- 
vidualistic than  communistic.  "  What  will  you  do," 
one  of  the  propagandists  (Shellyabov)  asked  a  peasant 
whom  he  thought  already  entirely  converted  to  the 
socialist  doctrine,  "if  you  should  get  some  five  hun- 
dred rubles?"  "Well,  I  will  open  a  saloon,"  the  peas- 
ant answered. 

A  few  months,  and  sometimes  even  a  few  weeks,  of 
such  experiences  were  sufficient  to  convince  the  young 
men  that  their  propaganda  in  the  village  was  quite 
hopeless.  Both  "propagandists"  and  "rioters,"  there- 
fore, were  disappointed :  the  former,  to  find  the  real 
people  so  ignorant;  the  latter,  to  find  them  so  unwilling 
to  adopt  the  road  of  action.  The  socialists  expected 
to  find  the  people  unprepared  for  an  immediate  social 
revolution;  but  now  they  saw  clearly  that  even  a 
preparation  for  a  social  revolution  in  the  future  was 
much  more  difficult  than  they  had  generally  realized. 
To  lay  hold  of  the  people,  a  much  more  realistic  method 
evidently  was  needed. 

But  what  were  these  more  realistic  methods  of 
propaganda  to  be?  The  answer  differed,  according  to 
the  difference  in  the  doctrine.  The  "  propagandists '" 
or  the  "Lavrists"  (improperly  so  called)  now  began 


THE  SOCIALISTIC  IDEA  409 

to  realize  that  so  long  as  communal  property  existed 
it  was  useless  to  hope  for  any  movement  whatever  on 
the  part  of  the  peasantry,  and  that  the  workingmen 
alone  were  able  to  understand  the  pure  socialistic  doc- 
trine. But  that  group  formed  only  a  small  circle  in  St. 
Petersburg.  They  called  themselves  "  Lavrists  "  be- 
cause they  had  helped  Lavrov  to  start  his  periodical 
Fonuard;  but  we  know  that  Lavrov,  after  having  emi- 
grated, developed  a  doctrine  much  more  like  the  current 
one,  and  he  soon  resigned  the  editorship  on  the  ground 
of  being  at  variance  with  the  circle.  The  great  major- 
ity of  the  revolutionists  were  with  Lavrov  (and  Bakoo- 
nin)  against  the  "Lavrists."  They  were  not  prepared 
to  denounce  their  former  faith  in  the  commune  and  to 
forsake  the  peasantry.  The  only  lesson  they  derived 
from  the  failure  of  1873-74  was  that  in  order  to  come 
into  closer  contact  with  the  people  they  must  change 
their  methods  of  treating  them.  If  the  people  could 
not  be  raised  up  to  their  level  of  "  pure  socialism,"  then 
they  must  descend  to  the  level  of  the  people's  under- 
standing.    Mr.  Shellyabov  stated  this  view  thus: 

The  short  period  of  their  going  to  the  people  has  proved  that 
their  strivings  are  nothing  but  book-wisdom  and  mere  doctrinar- 
ianism.  But,  on  the  other  hand,  the  same  experience  has  shown  that 
there  are  many  aspects  of  the  popular  consciousness  which  must 
be  given  careful  attention.  Considering,  therefore,  that  under  the 
existing  difficulties  created  by  the  government  it  was  impossible 
to  make  the  people's  mind  entirely  socialistic,  the  socialists  have 
become  "  populists."  ....  They  have  resolved  to  act  in  the  name 
of  the  interests  acknowledged  by  the  people  —  not  in  the  name  of 
the  pure  doctrine ;  and  thus  they  would  keep  to  the  firm  ground 
of  actual  life  and  of  the  people's  conscious  strivings.  From  meta- 
physical dreamers,  then,  they  have  become  positivists. 


410  RUSSIA  AND  ITS  CRISIS 

From  the  new  point  of  view,  the  methods  of  the 
propaganda  of  1874  were  simply  infantile.  "  The  times 
have  passed,"  one  of  the  revolutionists  then  wrote, 
"  when  every  stripling  and  every  damsel  scarce  out  of 
their  teens  could  dream  that  they  might  become  useful 
factors  in  the  village,  and  that  they  could  promote  the 
popular  cause  by  merely  changing  their  fine  linen  and 
their  European  dress  for  homespun  duck  and  a  peas- 
ant's coat."  And  another  revolutionist  says,  while 
characterizing  the  propaganda  of  1873-74:  "I  am 
very  sorry  to  have  to  acknowledge  that  our  propa- 
gandists were  merely  flying  through  Russia ;  they  did 
not  settle  anywhere;  and  they  offered  as  excuse  that 
they  had  chanced  to  drop  into  uncongenial  surround- 
ings. Living  an  idle  life  among  working-people,  they 
at  the  same  time  thoitght  themselves  to  be  doing  some- 
thing sensible.  They  spent  thousands  of  rubles  for 
their  democratic  outings,  but  all  to  no  avail." 

The  only  practical  inference  to  be  drawn  from 
these  criticisms  was  that  mere  "outings"  in  rags  and 
disguise  could  never  bring  the  "intellectuals"  into 
close  contact  with  the  people,  but  only  steady  profes- 
sional work  in  the  people's  midst:  the  work  of  the 
smith,  the  miller,  the  carpenter,  the  midwife,  the 
teacher,  and  the  physician.  To  attain  this  aim,  per- 
manent settlements  were  to  be  founded  in  the  villages. 

Another  inference  drawn  from  the  experience  of 
1872-74  was  that  with  the  loose  organization  of  revo- 
lutionary circles  in  "federated  communes"  no  systematic 
and  lasting  work  was  possible,  and  that  therefore  a  sys- 
tem of  closer  connections  was  to  be  founded,  more 
likely  to  secure  secrecy  and  unity  of  action.     Lacking 


THE  SOCIALISTIC  IDEA  411 

that  concertedness  and  secrecy,  nearly  all  the  propagan- 
dists of  1874,  and  of  the  two  or  three  following  years, 
were  at  once  detected  by  the  authorities. 

Thus,  the  establishing  of  permanent  settlements  of 
educated  propagandists  in  the  villages,  and  a  central- 
ized direction  of  their  activity,  were  to  be  the  main 
features  of  the  new  method,  and  necessitated  the  up- 
building of  a  new  organization.  This  organization 
was  started  in  the  autumn  of  1876,  under  the  charac- 
teristic name  of  the  "Land  and  Liberty"  party  —  a 
popular  formula  already  used  by  the  Russian  revolu- 
tionists some  fifteen  years  before.  This  name  empha- 
sized the  central  axiom  of  populism,  that  "  the 
foundation  of  every  really  revolutionary  program 
must  be  the  ideals  of  the  people,  as  they  are  formed  at 
a  certain  time  and  in  a  certain  place."  "We  do  not 
believe,"  the  program  of  the  new  party  emphatically 
stated,  "  that  it  is  possible  by  means  of  any  propaganda 
to  form  in  the  people's  minds  ideals  different  from  those 
developed  by  the  whole  previous  history  of  the  people." 
"  Revolutions  are  the  work  of  the  masses  as  a  whole. 
Revolutionaries  cannot  correct  anything.  They  can 
only  be  a  weapon  of  history,  the  recorders  of  the  striv- 
ings of  a  people." 

And  these  popular  strivings  the  populists  be- 
lieved to  be  twofold:  (i)  "the  appropriation  of 
the  land  by  those  who  till  it"  —  an  idea  which  corre- 
sponded more  or  less  to  the  real  historical  tradition 
of  the  Russian  agriculturists;  and  (2)  "Liberty 
for  everybody  to  dispose  his  own  afifairs"  —  an  am- 
biguous formula  which  transformed  the  former  popu- 
lar wish  for  "freedom"  (as  opposed  to  "serfdom") 


412  RUSSIA  AND  ITS  CRISIS 

into  a  principle  of  Proudhon  and  Bakoonin.  This  for- 
mula made  it  possible  for  the  populists,  on  the  one 
hand,  to  preserve  their  former  belief  that  a  new  order 
of  things  would  evolve  by  itself  "out  of  those  elements 
of  socialism  already  built  up  in  the  minds  of  the 
people;''  and,  on  the  other  hand,  in  their  quality  of 
real  "positivists,"  quietly  to  leave  this  "future  to  the 
future,"  while  choosing  for  their  present  task  "the 
acceleration  of  the  coming  agrarian  revolution."  And 
this  next  step  was  to  be  brought  about  by  such  means 
as  were  thought  to  be  accessible  to  the  people  even  in 
their  pre-socialistic  state  of  mind.  Stenka  Rahzin  and 
Poogachov  —  two  leaders  of  the  popular  uprisings  of 
the  seventeenth  and  eighteenth  centuries  —  remained 
the  heroes  of  the  populists.  The  more  sanguine  among 
them  were  ready  to  resort  to  the  methods  of  these 
heroes  and  to  lead  the  people  to  revolution  in  the  name 
of  the  Tsar.  Indeed  an  attempt  to  rouse  the  popula- 
tion by  a  forged  manifesto  had  actually  been  made  in 
southern  Russia  (in  Chighireen)  ;  and  an  article  — 
which  remained  unpublished  —  seriously  discussed  the 
usefulness  of  nominating  a  Tsar  impostor  who  should 
start  a  popular  revolution,  and  then  complete  it  by  a 
formal  abrogation  of  the  tsardom.  But  the  great 
majority  of  the  party  rejected  charlatanism  and 
mystification  as  a  means  of  political  action. 

Mystification,  however,  was  the  necessary  conse- 
quence of  the  new  attitude  toward  the  peasants.  To 
indorse  the  ideals  and  the  strivings  of  the  people  just 
as  they  were  formulated  in  the  people's  mind,  and  to 
sacrifice  to  them  —  although  only  temporarily  —  the 
ideas  of  the  "  intellectuals,"  was  inherent  in  their  very 


THE  SOCIALISTIC  IDEA  413 

idea.  Thus  a  sort  of  mental  and  moral  disguise  took 
the  place  of  the  physical  disguise  of  the  propaganda  of 
1874;  but  it  did  not  succeed  any  better  than  the  latter. 
Naturally  enough,  the  eagerness  of  the  revolutionaries 
for  their  work  in  the  village  cooled  just  in  proportion 
as  it  became  clear  that  the  "  people's  ideals  "  were  too 
peculiar  to  be  used  as  a  basis  for  an  agitation  or  a 
propaganda.  And  gradually  as  their  resolution  to 
work  in  the  villages  weakened,  the  whole  activity  of 
the  party  took  another  direction. 

Along  with  the  permanent  settlements  in  the  vil- 
lages, the  members  of  the  "  Land  and  Liberty  "  society 
had  also  to  organize  settlements  in  the  towns  and  cities. 
The  activity  of  these  latter  settlements  was  to  be  merely 
subsidiary  and  administrative.  They  were  to  secure 
the  relations  between  the  village  settlements,  to  serve 
as  temporary  places  of  refuge,  to  keep  the  money,  to 
procure  forged  passports  for  the  revolutionists,  and  to 
recruit  new  members  among  the  students  of  the  uni- 
versities and  among  the  workingmen  of  the  factories. 
The  genuine  "populists"  looked  down  upon  the  activ- 
ity of  the  city  centers.  In  their  program,  to  be  sure, 
they  admitted  the  possibility  of  other  forms  of  revolu- 
tionary w'ork  than  their  own  activity  in  the  villages. 
But  the  same  program  considered  any  concentration  of 
the  militant  forces  of  the  party  upon  these  "  second- 
ary" lines  of  action  —  a  propaganda  in  the  cities,  and 
a  direct  struggle  with  the  agents  of  the  government  — 
as  a  "  contradiction  "  of  the  chief  aim  of  the  "  agrarian 
revolution."  Now  that  the  agrarian  movement  had 
proved  to  be  impossible  without  a  forgery,  the  city 
group  of  the  revolutionists  gradually  took  the  lead  in 
the  whole  movement. 


414  RUSSIA  AND  ITS  CRISIS 

The  revolutionists  ought  to  have  been  aware  that, 
while  their  propaganda  in  the  villages  could  not  strike 
root  at  all,  the  propaganda  in  the  cities  was  always 
successful.  The  workingmen  proved  much  more  recep- 
tive toward  "pure  socialism"  than  the  peasants  of 
populism;  and  the  only  complaint  against  the  intel- 
lectuals on  the  part  of  the  factory  workers  was  that 
they  did  not  pay  enough  attention  to  the  revolutionary 
elements  among  the  latter.  The  most  advanced  work- 
ingmen found  the  pamphlets  spread  by  the  revolution- 
ists among  the  peasants  too  elementary  and  too  childish ; 
they  asked  for  more  serious  reading.  "We  are  not 
plain  peasants,"  they  asserted  —  to  the  utter  horror  of 
their  populist  leaders,  in  whose  eyes  a  workingman  was 
merely  a  bad  sort  of  peasant.  And  though  in  the  vil- 
lages the  propagandists  vainly  tried  to  provoke  an 
agrarian  movement,  yet  in  the  cities  a  strike  of  the 
workingmen  always  came  before  the  propagandists 
were  ready  to  draw  full  profit  from  it.  In  a  word,  if 
for  the  villages  the  propagandists  were  too  socialistic, 
in  the  cities  they  proved  to  be  not  socialistic  enough. 
And  last,  but  not  least,  the  propagandists  were  against 
political  demands  and  in  favor  of  a  mere  economic  pro- 
gram ;  while  the  workingmen  began  to  feel  that  politi- 
cal reform  was  necessary  for  themselves  as  well  as  for 
the  liberals.  In  1879  a  "Northern  Alliance  of  Work- 
ingmen" was  organized  —  an  organization  from  which 
the  intellectuals  were  formally  excluded.  Its  central 
demand  was  for  political  reform  as  a  necessary  step  to 
the  further  advance  of  the  labor  movement.  The  fact 
that  this  organization  stuck  to  its  political  demands 
loses  nothing  of   its   significance  even   though   it   be 


THE  SOCIALISTIC  IDEA  415 

proved  that  one  of  the  founders  was  an  adherent  of 
Tkachov,  whose  theories  he  brought  directly  from 
abroad.  The  "  Land  and  Liberty  "  periodical  protested 
against  the  heresy;  but  the  protest  merely  served  to 
emphasize  the  significance  of  that  heresy,  without  being 
able  to  change  the  mind  of  the  advanced  w^orkingmen 
of  St.  Petersburg. 

Moreover,  it  soon  became  quite  clear  that  more 
important  dissensions  of  the  same  kind  existed  within 
the  "  Land  and  Liberty  "  party  itself.  The  city  mem- 
bers of  the  party  had  decidedly  forsaken  the  tradition 
of  populism,  and  had  struck  out  a  new  line  of  activity 
which  entirely  contradicted  the  dogma  of  populism. 

This  group  had  the  most  to  do  with  the  govern- 
ment prosecution;  and,  quite  imperceptibly  to  itself, 
it  was  driven  from  a  neutral  position  toward  the  gov- 
ernment into  overt  defensive  actions,  and  from  a  pas- 
sive defense  to  active  struggle  of  a  quite  political  char- 
acter. The  necessity  for  "self-defense"  already  was 
acknowledged  in  the  program  of  the  party.  Very  soon, 
beginning  with  the  assassination  of  spies,  it  culminated 
in  a  deliberate  and  systematic  struggle  against  the 
higher  representatives  of  the  government. 

In  the  beginning,  the  terroristic  acts  of  the  revolu- 
tionists were  due  chiefly  to  psychological  and  personal 
motives.  Besides  the  necessity  of  self-defense,  they 
soon  felt  entitled  to  avenge  on  the  government  the 
death  and  exile  of  their  friends.  But  then  they  could 
not  remain  unaware  that,  while  all  their  propaganda 
and  agitation  were  lost  without  any  visible  result,  their 
attempts  to  oppose  force  with  force  produced  a  deep 
impression  both  on  the  government  and  on    Russian 


4i6  RUSSIA  AND  ITS  CRISIS 

educated  society.  Terrorism  proved  to  be  a  most 
effective  means  of  political  struggle.  One  of  the  first 
attempts  of  this  kind,  though  a  quite  personal  one  and 
unconnected  with  any  party  organization,  was  the 
attempt  of  Vera  Zasoolich  upon  the  life  of  Trepov  (the 
father  of  the  present  governor-general  of  St.  Peters- 
burg), February  6,  1878.^^  The  jury,  with  the  general 
approval  of  public  opinion,  acquitted  Vera  Zasoolich. 
This,  then,  was  a  struggle  for  human  rights,  not  for  a 
theoretical  social  revolution;  and  the  revolutionaries 
soon  felt  that  they  had  with  them  the  sympathies  of 
educated  Russian  society.  They  ended  by  forming  a 
nucleus  of  members,  under  the  name  of  the  "  Executive 
Committee  of  the  Socialist  Revolutionaries,"  which 
undertook  to  wage  a  systematic  war  on  the  govern- 
ment. 

Now,  as  a  system,  terrorism  stood,  of  course,  in 
flagrant  contradiction  to  the  theory  of  populism.  Not 
that  the  terroristic  acts  themselves  were  condemned; 
but  they  meant  a  political  struggle,  for  a  political  re- 
form; i.  c,  for  the  aims  of  the  liberals.  In  the  view 
of  the  terrorists  themselves,^^  terrorism  was  only  an 
incidental  feature  —  one  of  the  means  of  the  struggle. 
The  chief  question  was  whether  or  not  the  struggle 
must  be  political  or  economic.  And  this  question  it 
was,  rather  than  terrorism,  which  brought  dissensions 
in  the  "  Land  and  Liberty  "  party. 

The  current  opinion  on  this  matter  was  that  a 
political  revolution  alone  would  be  not  only  ineffective, 

'^  See  p.  191. 

^'  See,  e.  g.,  the  depositions  of  Quaitkovskee  and  Sherayev  in 
their  trials. 


THE  SOCIALISTIC  IDEA  417 

but  also  dangerous  to  the  people,  since  it  would  give 
power  to  the  liberals  —  the  bourgeoisie  and  the  middle 
class.  A  constitution,  the  populists  thought,  would 
rather  delay  than  accelerate  the  advent  of  the  social 
revolution,  and.  furthermore,  it  w^ould  compromise  its 
success.  The  only  means  for  bringing  about  such  a 
revolution  were  the  propaganda  and  the  "  riots ;  "  and 
these  must  be  used  continuously  until  the  socialistic 
consciousness  should  be  generally  spread  abroad  and 
the  reign  of  socialism  inaugurated. 

But  since  both  the  riots  and  the  propaganda  had 
proved  unsuccessful,  the  revolutionists  realized  that 
they  must  change  their  tactics.  If  the  state  of  mind  of 
the  peasants  could  in  some  degree  account  for  their 
lack  of  success,  the  other  —  and  practically  the  only 
important  —  cause  of  the  failure  was  the  impossibility 
of  influencing  the  lower  classes,  owing  to  the  severe 
measures  taken  by  the  police.  They  found  that  they 
had  not  sufficiently  appreciated  the  obstacles  put  in 
their  way  by  the  complete  absence  of  legal  forms  for 
any  political  propaganda  in  Russia;  and  they,  as  w-ell 
as  the  workingmen,  came  to  the  conclusion  that  such 
elementary  forms  of  political  life  as  are  secured  by  a 
constitution  were  as  necessary  for  themselves  as  for  the 
Russian  liberals.  Mr.  Shellyabov,  one  of  the  most 
prominent  leaders  of  the  new  group,  advocated  the  new 
policy  on  the  following  grounds : 

The  party  does  not  strive  to  attain  political  reforms.  This 
task  should  belong  entirely  to  the  men  who  call  themselves 
liberals.  But  these  men  are  entirely  powerless  in  Russia,  and, 
whatever  the  reasons  are,  they  have  proved  incapable  of  giving 
Russia  free  institutions  and  guaranties  of  personal  rights.  How- 
ever, such  institutions  are  so  necessary  that  no  activity  appears  to 


4i8  RUSSIA  AND  ITS  CRISIS 

be  possible  without  them.  Therefore,  the  Russian  socialistic 
party  is  obliged  to  assume  the  duty  of  crushing  despotism  and  of 
giving  Russia  those  political  reforms  under  which  a  struggle  of 
opinions  will  become  possible.  That  is  why  we  must  take  for  our 
immediate  goal  something  which  will  lay  a  solid  foundation  for 
political  liberty,  and  which  will  unite  all  the  elements  more  or  less 
capable  of  becoming  politically  active. 

Now,  that  "something"  had  to  be  chosen  in  such 
a  way  as  not  to  abandon  entirely  the  accepted  theory  of 
Russian  popuHsm.  And  so  the  adherents  of  the  new 
program  have  adopted  for  their  pohtical  platform  a 
"  constitutional  convention,"  freely  elected  by  a  general 
vote.  It  was  understood  that  at  least  90  per  cent,  of 
such  an  assembly  should  consist  of  peasant  delegates, 
and  that  these  should  be  ready  to  lift  up  their  voices  for 
an  agrarian  revolution.  With  this  argument  the  con- 
science of  the  Russian  populists  was  quieted;  for, 
though  they  were  now  struggling  for  political  freedom, 
they  still  remained  true  to  their  former  aim  of  an 
agrarian  revolution. 

Nevertheless,  it  was  not  easy  to  reconcile  the  great 
bulk  of  the  populists  to  this  problematic  argument  of 
a  socialistic  convention,  through  which  the  "  will  of  the 
people"  should  dictate  its  decisions.  The  populists 
were  also  opposed  to  such  measures  of  political  warfare 
as  were  resorted  to  by  their  more  advanced  friends. 
They  said  that  the  partisans  of  the  "  will  of  the  people," 
while  concentrating  all  their  forces  on  terroristic  acts, 
forgot  the  real  people.  Thus  activity  in  the  villages, 
owing  to  the  enforced  measures  of  the  police,  became 
entirely  impossible;  and  as  only  a  few  might  share  in 
the  plots  of  the  terroristic  group,  the  remaining  major- 
ity of  the  populists  were  doomed  to  remain  inactive, 


THE  SOCIALISTIC  IDEA  419 

mere  idle  observerSj  which  necessarily  must  result  in 
cooling  off  their  revolutionary  ardor.  And,  supposing 
that  the  aim  of  terrorism  should  be  attained,  who  would 
then  prepare  the  people  to  vote  for  the  populist  candi- 
dates ?  And  when  would  the  people  get  their  prepara- 
tion? If  unprepared,  would  not  the  people  be  obliged 
to  give  way  to  the  liberals  and  the  middle  classes  the 
day  after  the  political  revolution?  Would  it  not  come 
to  the  same  old  and  inefficient  scheme  of  making  a 
social  revolution  by  means  of  changing  a  government  ? 
These  arguments  were  irrefutable.  Evidently  there 
was  no  way  of  reconciling  the  two  views.  The  popu- 
list party  of  the  "Land  and  Liberty"  was  split  in 
twain.  The  advocates  of  a  political  struggle  in  the 
summer  of  1879,  at  a  private  meeting  in  Lippetsk, 
formed  the  germ  of  the  new  party,  chiefly  out  of  for- 
mer "  rioters  "  or  of  new  recruits.  Nearly  all  of  them 
belonged  to  southern  Russia,  where  the  movement  was 
the  most  pronounced,  and  where  the  northern  organiza- 
tion of  "  Land  and  Liberty  "  never  had  much  influence. 
In  the  autumn  of  1879  the  new  party  of  the  "Will  of 
People,"  terroristic  and  political,  formally  proclaimed 
its  independence,  and  resumed  on  a  larger  scale  the 
terroristic  activity  of  the  "  Executive  Committee," 
which  culminated  in  the  regicide  of  March  13,  1881. 
It  is  impossible  to  recount  here  the  facts  of  the  struggle, 
which  have  so  often  been  described,  as  our  chief  aim  is 
to  trace  the  theory  of  the  movement. 

So  far  as  this  theory  is  concerned,  the  difference 
between  the  new  and  the  old  party  was  not  so  great  as 
might  have  been  expected.  The  same  Shellyabov, 
whose  arguments  for  a  new  policy  we  have  quoted, 


420  RUSSIA  AND  ITS  CRISIS 

admitted  in  private  that  practical  necessity  alone  had 
forced  him  to  assume  a  new  position,  for  his  heart 
remained  entirely  on  the  side  of  his  opponents.  His 
own  letter,  published  by  Mr.  Dragomanov  in  the  Free 
Word  in  1881,  shows  this  pretty  clearly : 

So  queer  is  the  position  of  things  that,  though  you  begin  with 
the  real  interests  of  the  people  and  profess  their  economic  Hbera- 
tion  to  be  the  most  essential  boon,  you  make  political  demands 
your  first  aim ;  and  though  you  see  salvation  in  changing  the 
empire  into  a  federation  of  independent  parts,  you  demand  a 
constitutional  convention !  It  is  no  great  merit  to  keep  intact 
your  social  ideal,  after  the  manner  of  an  ascetic.  We  preferred, 
anyhow,  to  remain  laymen. 

Even  for  the  terroristic  measures  which  it  resorted 
to  in  its  struggle  the  new  party  was  inclined  to  apolo- 
gize, and  to  prove  their  necessity,  not  by  any  theory, 
but  by  the  conditions  of  time  and  place.  Russian 
terrorism  was  often,  particularly  abroad,  understood  to 
be  the  application  of  an  anarchistic  theory.  We  have 
seen,  however,  that  the  anarchistic  elements  were 
gradually  being  eliminated  from  the  Russian  socialistic 
theory;  and  the  very  appearance  of  the  "People's 
Will "  party  was  one  of  the  most  decisive  steps  toward 
a  definitive  rupture  with  the  anarchistic  origin  of  the 
theory.  We  have  seen  that  during  their  trials  the 
members  of  the  party  expressly  emphasized  that  in 
their  view  the  only  important  feature  of  their  policy 
was  political  struggle,  and  that  terrorism  was  only  a 
temporary  and  accidental  means.  And  Shellyabov,  in 
his  defense  before  the  court,  formally  repudiated  the 
accusation  of  "  anarchism  "  which  was  formerly,  in  a 
sense,  acknowledged  by  certain  defendants  in  earlier 
trials  (e.  g.,  in  the  speech  of  Bardena).     "This  is  an 


THE  SOCIALISTIC  IDEA  421 

antiquated  accusation,"  Shellyabov  said.  "We  are  for 
the  state,  not  for  anarchism.  We  recognize  that  the 
government  will  ahvays  exist,  and  that  the  state  must 
necessarily  remain  so  long  as  there  are  any  public 
interests  to  be  served." 

Thus  the  terroristic  acts  of  the  "People's  Will" 
party,  whatever  opinion  one  may  hold  about  them,  have 
nothing  in  common  with  the  theory  of  anarchistic 
"propaganda  by  deeds."  The  difference  between  the 
two  cannot  be  defined  more  clearly  than  was  done  by 
the  "  People's  Will "  party  itself  upon  the  occasion  of 
the  assassination  of  President  Garfield.  The  Executive 
Committee  of  the  party,  while  expressing  deep  sym- 
pathy with  the  American  nation, 

also  protested,  in  the  name  of  all  Russian  revolutionaries,  against 
such  violent  acts  as  the  assault  of  Guiteau.  In  a  country  where 
the  liberty  of  the  individual  makes  an  honest  struggle  of  opinions 
possible,  and  where  the  free  will  of  the  people  determines,  not 
only  the  law,  but  even  the  personality  of  the  rulers,  political 
assassination,  as  a  weapon,  is  only  an  expression  of  the  same 
spirit  of  despotism  the  destruction  of  which  in  Russia  we  con- 
sider to  be  our  task.  Despotism  of  an  individual  is  equally  as 
despicable  as  despotism  of  a  party;  violence  can  be  justified  only 
when  it  is  directed  against  violence. 

The  terroristic  activity  of  the  Executive  Committee 
has  entirely  thrown  into  the  background  the  "  village 
group  "  of  the  old  "  Land  and  Liberty  "  party.  After 
the  secession  of  the  terrorists  in  the  autumn  of  1879,  it 
was  mutually  agreed  that  the  former  party  title  should 
no  longer  be  used;  and  the  remaining  members  of  the 
former  "Land  and  Liberty"  party  adopted  a  new 
name,  the  "General  (or  Black)  Land  Partition."  This 
again  was  a  term  very  popular  among  the   Russian 


422  RUSSIA  AND  ITS  CRISIS 

peasants,  meaning  a  kind  of  "  nationalization  of  land." 
The  title  emphasized  the  fact  that  the  bulk  of  the 
populists,  though  their  former  doctrine  had  been  en- 
tirely undermined  by  their  practical  failure,  remained 
true  to  it.  With  them  as  with  their  antagonists,  their 
heads  were  in  discord  with  their  hearts.  Their  heads 
were  for  their  theory,  while  their  hearts  were  with  the 
actual  stragglers.  With  the  terrorists  quite  the  oppo- 
site was  the  case,  their  hearts  still  clinging  to  the  old 
theory,  while  their  heads  favored  a  change  in  the  prac- 
tical means  to  this  end.  The  populists,  then,  though 
keeping  to  their  principles,  remained  inactive;  while 
the  terrorists  preferred  to  be  active  and  inconsistent. 
The  position  of  both  parties  was  inconvenient  and 
could  be  only  transient.  The  necessity  of  reconciling 
the  theory  of  the  socialistic  movement  to  its  practice 
was  evident  to  everybody;  but  for  the  terrorists  at 
least,  who  were  in  the  heat  of  the  struggle,  there  was 
no  time  to  reconsider  fundamental  principles. 

Their  opponents,  the  pure  populists,  however,  had 
more  leisure  to  discuss  their  points  of  divergence. 
While  the  terrorist  leaders  were  one  by  one  ferreted 
out  and  either  hanged  or  imprisoned  for  life,  the 
leaders  of  the  "Black  Partition"  group  fled  abroad 
(1879-80)  and  embarked  upon  a  lively  literary  cam- 
paign. As  the  activity  of  the  terrorists  was  becoming 
"political,"  and  so  suspected  of  "liberalism,"  the  pure 
populists  found  themselves  in  the  profitable  position  of 
defenders  of  socialistic  principles.  Thus  they  were 
drawn  nearer  to  that  group  of  pure  socialists  who  were 
more  "  Lavrist "  than  Lavrov  himself,  and  who,  not 


THE  SOCIALISTIC  IDEA  423 

believing  in  revolutionary  measures,  remained  in- 
active."^ 

The  transition  from  pure  populism  to  pure  social- 
ism was  accomplished  so  much  more  rapidl)'-  by  the 
"  Black  Partition "  group  for  the  reasons  that  this 
group  was  comparatively  small  in  number,  was  much 
less  bound  by  the  tradition  of  the  "  Land  and  Liberty  " 
party,  lacked  the  practical  experience  of  the  "  People's 
W'ill "  party,  and  relied  more  upon  new  forces  from 
the  3'ounger  generation.  In  short,  the  party  was  much 
more  inclined  toward  socialistic  theory  than  toward 
revolutionary  practice. 

The  point  of  view  of  "pure  socialism"  —  the  same 
as  now  prevails  in  the  Socialist  Democratic  party  — 
had  been  formulated  very  early.  Thus  we  found  it  in 
the  circle  of  St.  Petersburg  "Lavrists;"  and  as  early 
as  1880  we  can  see  it  again  formulated  by  Mr.  Axelrod, 
I  one  of  the  leaders  of  the  new  group. 

The  statement  of  Mr.  Axelrod  runs  as  follows : 

All  nations  have  passed  through  the  stage  of  the  collective 
ownership  of  land ;  all  have  once  fought  a  desperate  fight  for  its 
preservation;  and  yet  finally  it  perished  everywhere.  And, 
indeed,  Karl  Marx  proved,  by  the  theory  of  organic  development 
of  human  society,  the  internal  necessity  of  that  terrible  process  of 
expropriation  of  communal  property,  to  pave  the  way  for  the 
civilization  of  the  bourgeoisie.  Russian  life  contains  also  material 
enough  to  prove  that  the  destruction  of  the  village  community 
and  the  expropriation  of  the  peasants  are  unavoidable.  In  the 
face  of  this  evidence,  a  serious  question  presents  itself  to  every 
conscientious  man:  If  it  is  so,  is  it  worth  while  to  spend  eflfort 
upon  a  thing  doomed  to  perish  ?  Is  it  not  more  rational  to  search 
elsewhere  for  support?  The  revolutionary  thought  turns  to  the 
workingmen.    To  be  sure,  this  class  is  as  yet  too  small  in  number 

'^  See  p.  409. 


424  RUSSIA  AND  ITS  CRISIS 

for  a  successful  struggle;  they  have  not  yet  grown  conscious  of 
what  are  the  conditions  of  their  existence,  and  therefore  it  is 
difficult  to  expect  that  they  should  at  present  become  a  center  of 
a  socialistic  revolutionary  movement.  But  if  we  consider  the 
labor  movement  in  western  Europe,  with  its  quickly  developing 
theories  and  ideas,  it  will  help  the  imagination  to  anticipate  even 
for  Russia  an  impending  movement  on  the  part  of  the  working- 
men,  on  socialistic  lines.  And  even  if  there  should  be  no  hope  of 
achieving  in  the  immediate  future  any  serious  results  by  trans- 
ferring revolutionary  activity  to  the  circles  of  workingmen, 
still  this  will  be  better  than  that  labor  of  Sisyphus,  the  agita-^ 
tion  among  the  peasants,  whose  economic  organization  is  doomed 
to  destruction,  and  who  are  unable  to  adopt  the  socialistic  point  of 
view  because  they  cling  to  their  ancient  habits  and  because  their 
ideas  are  so  limited.™ 

It  was  a  long  journey  from  pure  populism  to  this 
view  of  orthodox  Marxism.  The  road  was,  however, 
traversed  in  a  comparatively  short  time  by  Mr.  Pleha- 
nov,  the  former  editor  of  the  Black  Partition  periodical. 
Mr.  Plehanov's  articles  in  the  Black  Partition  were, 
with  some  very  slight  alterations  in  the  argument,  quite 
populistic.  But  after  the  arrest  of  the  elder  members 
of  the  party,  and  his  own  flight  abroad,  and  particu- 
larly after  the  ultimate  defeat  of  the  "  People's  Will " 
party,  Mr.  Plehanov's  friends  tried  to  rally  the  retreat- 
ing army  of  revolutionaries;  and,  as  a  theoretical 
rallying-point,  Mr.  Plehanov  developed  a  doctrine  in 
which  he  tried  to  solve  the  difficulties  and  contradic- 
tions of  populism  by  socialistic  arguments.  The  first 
document  pointing  out  the  change  is  the  "  Program 
of  the  North-Russian  Society  of  Land  and  Liberty," 
published  in  1880.     But  here  the  change  does  not  go 

^°  See    the    Jahrbuch    fi'tr    Sociahvissenschaft    und    SocialpoUtik 
(edited  Dr.  L.  Richter),  Vol.  II. 


THE  SOCIALISTIC  IDEA  425 

beyond  a  mere  juxtaposition  of  the  populist  "agita- 
tion" for  land  partition,  the  socialistic  "propaganda" 
of  purer  principles  among  the  workingmen  and  the 
"minority"  of  peasants,  and  a  terroristic  "political 
struggle."  A  more  thorough  reconstruction  of  the 
theory  was  undertaken  three  years  later,  in  1883,  when 
the  group  under  Mr.  Axelrod  and  Mr.  Plehanov  re- 
appeared under  a  new  name :  the  "  Group  for  the 
Liberation  of  Labor."  Here  we  have  to  do  with  a 
deliberate  attempt  to  introduce  into  Russia  the  teach- 
ings of  the  German  Social  Democratic  party.  This,  as 
we  have  seen,  had  been  tried  by  Lavrov,  and  it  had 
failed  because  of  the  many  concessions  which  he  made 
to  the  ancient  theory,  which  had  preserved  its  fascina- 
tion for  the  Russian  revolutionists.  The  "  Black  Parti- 
tion "  still  united  both  theories,  the  anarchistic  and  the 
socialistic  —  a  union  which  found  its  characteristic 
reflection  in  the  very  name  of  the  party,  "  Federalist 
Socialists."  This  time  Mr.  Plehanov's  group  took 
definite  leave  of  the  last  survivals  of  anarchism  and 
started  a  genuine  social  democracy  in  Russia. 

It  is  well  known  that  the  doctrines  of  Marx  repre- 
sent a  synthesis  of  the  ideas  of  economic  emancipation 
and  political  struggle;  and  it  was  just  such  a  synthesis 
that  the  revolutionaries  of  the  "  People's  Will "  party 
needed  so  badly,  but  which  at  the  same  time,  they  could 
not  attain  until  their  centralistic  practice  became  at 
variance  with  their  "  federalistic "  theory.  Marx's 
starting-point,  as  well  as  theirs,  was  that  economic 
emancipation  can  be  achieved  only  by  the  workingmen 
themselves ;  but  Marx  wanted  the  workingmen  to  unite 
for  this  purpose  in  a  large  political  party  and  to  fight 


426  RUSSIA  AND  ITS  CRISIS 

their  battles  of  class  interest,  not  by  way  of  small  riots 
in  isolated  villages,  but  by  the  large,  centralized  organi- 
zation of  a  labor  party  whose  aim  should  be  to  come 
into  possession  of  political  power.  These  were  also  the 
principles  laid  down  for  the  reconstruction  of  the  Rus- 
sian socialistic  doctrine  in  the  pamphlets  of  Mr.  Ple- 
hanov.  Socialism  and  Political  Struggle  (1883)  and 
Our  Variances  (1885). 

In  these  pamphlets,  however,  Mr.  Plehanov  was 
far  from  adopting  the  point  of  view  of  Marxism  as 
stated  by  Mr.  Axelrod  in  1880.  He  did  not  yet  break 
away  from  the  populist  view  as  to  the  general  scheme 
and  surroundings  of  the  coming  social  revolution. 
According  to  him,  the  revolution  was  still  to  be  an 
agrarian  one;  and  he  even  admits,  on  the  authority  of 
Marx  himself,  that  the  Russian  village  community  may 
form  a  short-cut  for  attaining  the  socialistic  stage. 
"  We  do  not  hold  to  the  view,"  he  says  for  both  him- 
self and  his  friends,  "  a  view  which  is  falsely  ascribed 
to  the  school  of  Marx,  that  the  socialistic  movement 
cannot  be  supported  by  our  peasantry  until  the  peasants 
shall  have  been  transformed  into  landless  proletaries, 
and  until  the  village  communities  shall  have  been  dis- 
solved by  capitalism.  We  think  that,  in  general,  the 
Russian  peasantry  would  accept  with  sympathy  every 
measure  by  which  the  so-called  '  nationalization  of  land  ' 
is  intended."  Yet,  at  the  same  time,  Mr.  Plehanov 
strongly  objected  to  the  delusion  that  the  change 
could  be  brought  about  immediately  by  that  impossible 
scheme  of  gathering  90  per  cent,  of  the  socialistic 
deputies  in  the  next  constitutional  convention,  and  he 
was  very  far  from  thinking  that  the  advent  of  a  social- 


THE  SOCIALISTIC  IDEA  427 

istic  government  was  at  hand  in  Russia.  Instead  of 
being  discouraged  by  this  delay,  Mr.  Plehanov  insisted 
all  the  more  on  the  necessity  of  a  political  struggle  for 
economic  emancipation ;  and  he  emphasized  the  fact 
that,  in  this  struggle,  "  for  the  first  time  all  attention 
must  be  concentrated  upon  the  industrial  centers,"  and 
that  a  central  organization  was  necessary  for  carrying 
out  such  a  struggle.    Says  he : 

The  only  aim  of  the  Russian  socialists  that  is  not  phantastical 
can  now  only  be,  first,  the  attainment  of  free  political  institutions, 
and,  second,  the  preparation  of  the  elements  for  the  building  of  a 
future  socialistic  party  in  Russia.  They  must  put  forth  a  demand 
for  a  democratic  constitution  which  would  secure  for  the  working- 
man  the  "  rights  of  a  citizen  "  together  with  the  "  rights  of  man," 
and  give  him,  by  means  of  a  general  vote,  the  possibility  of  taking 
an  active  part  in  the  political  life  of  the  country.  Such  a  program, 
while  it  would  frighten  nobody  by  a  "  red  specter  "  which  is  far 
off  as  yet,  would  evoke  sympathy  for  our  revolutionary  party  from 
everybody  who  does  not  belong  to  the  systematic  enemies  of 
democracy;  and,  furthermore,  it  could  be  indorsed  as  well  by 
socialists  as  by  very  many  representatives  of  our  liberalism 
....  In  this  case  the  interests  of  the  liberals  would  make  them 
combine  with  the  socialists  in  a  common  action  against  the  govern- 
ment  At  the  same  time,  those  liberals  who  are  less  timid 

and  more  judicious  would  cease  to  regard  revolutionaries  as 
unpractical  youths  who  devise  Utopias.  This  ....  view  would 
yield  to  another,  and  society  in  general  would  not  only  admire 
their  heroism,  but  also  have  regard  to  their  political  maturity. 

These  words  reveal  a  conciliatory  spirit  quite  un- 
common in  the  later  writings  of  Mr,  Plehanov,  but 
very  characteristic  of  the  general  state  of  opinion  after 
the  collapse  of  1881  and  during  the  following  decade 
of  political  stagnation.  "  Allies  of  today  and  enemies 
of  tomorrow"' — the  liberals  were  now  looked  upon 


428  RUSSIA  AND  ITS  CRISIS 

more  as  friends  than  as  enemies,  since  "tomorrow" 
appeared  likely  not  to  come  immediately.  Some  of  the 
socialists  even  were  ready  to  admit  that  the  very  col- 
lapse of  the  revolutionary  activity  and  the  complete 
failure  of  the  terroristic  struggle  of  1879-81  might 
have  been  avoided  had  the  revolutionaries  been  able  to 
secure  —  not  mere  sympathy,  which  they  had  possessed 
—  but  the  active  help  of  the  educated  classes  of  "so- 
ciety." 

The  "  alliance "  with  that  "  society "  was  now 
planned  on  an  enlarged  scale.  For  this  purpose  the 
socialists  had  to  emphasize  the  fact  that  they  were  no 
longer  indifferent  to  the  political  form  of  government ; 
that  they  appreciated  political  freedom  as  well  as  the 
men  of  "society; "  and  that  a  "constitution"  was  their 
first  and  foremost  aim.  All  contemporary  writings  of 
revolutionary  socialists  bear  witness  to  this  disposition. 
That  was  the  time  when  Stepnyak  was  trying  to  lay 
stress  upon  the  political  and  constitutional  side  of  the 
revolutionary  movement, ^^  and  when  another  populist, 
Mr.  Debagoree-jNIokreyavich,  accused  his  colleagues  of 
having  neglected  the  "political  idea"  in  their  program. 
The  new  organ  of  the  socialist  revolutionaries,  the 
Self -Government  (1887),  had  printed  the  letters  of 
different  —  and  discordant  —  revolutionary  leaders  ad- 
mitting that  they  considered  political  freedom  the  chief 
and  the  next  aim  for  the  Russian  movement.  Another 
revolutionary  organ,  Free  Russia,  went  farther  and 
proclaimed,  in  1889,  that  "political  freedom"  was  not 
only  a  temporary  aim,  but  "a  boon  in  itself;"  that 
"  other  than  political  aims  cannot  now  exist  in  Russia ;  " 

'^see  pp.  320  ff. 


THE  SOCIALISTIC  IDEA  429 

and  that  "  it  was  high  time  to  cease  from  classifying 
people  as  '  liberals '  and  '  revolutionaries.'  "  The  edi- 
tors were  ready  to  welcome  the  introduction  of  the 
Zcmsky  Sohor,  even  were  it  formed  out  of  the  repre- 
sentatives of  the  Zemstvos.  instead  of  those  of  the 
people. 

But  this  plan  was  too  much  for  a  socialist,  and  im- 
mediately a  reaction  set  in.  This  reaction,  however, 
very  characteristically  began  by  an  attempt  at  concilia- 
tion among  the  socialists  themselves,  since  it  was  im- 
possible between  the  socialists  and  the  liberals.  In  June, 
1889,  the  first  and  only  issue  of  a  new  revolutionary 
organ  appeared  in  Geneva,  under  the  significant  title 
of  Socialist.  Leaders  of  both  factions  of  Russian  so- 
cialism—  the  socialistic  revolutionaries  of  the  passing 
two  decades  and  the  socialistic  democrats  of  the  coming 
decades  —  tried  to  unite  on  this  common  ground,  in 
order  to  oppose  the  too  peaceful  disposition  of  Free 
Russia  toward  the  liberals.  The  names  of  Lavrov, 
Tarasov  (pseudonym),  and  Serebryakov  were  to  be 
seen  side  by  side  with  those  of  Plehanov  and  Axelrod. 
They  all  agreed  that  the  socialistic  character  of  the 
movement  was  to  be  retained,  without  abandoning  its 
nearest  political  aims.  They  likewise  agreed  that  the 
political  struggle  was  to  be  carried  on  by  the  working 
classes  themselves;  cind  the  help  of  the  liberal  "con- 
stitutionalists "  was  to  be  made  even  more  effective  by 
keeping  it  distinct  from  the  socialistic  movement 
proper.  Concerning  socialism  itself  the  editorial  tried 
to  formulate  a  policy  which  might  conciliate  both 
socialistic  factions,  but  which  was,  as  a  matter  of  fact, 
a  surrender  of  the  earlier  views  of  the  populists: 


430  RUSSIA  AND  ITS  CRISIS 

Considering  the  social  economy  of  Russia,  radical  changes 
are  in  progress  in  the  very  foundations  of  Russian  life.  Capital- 
ist production  gains  more  and  more  ground,  destroying  domestic 
economy  and  pushing  it  along  the  line  of  money  exchange.  Pro- 
duction in  factories  is  ever  on  the  increase.  In  domestic  industries 
the  so-called  "  domestic  system  of  capitalistic  production "  is 
observed  to  prevail.  The  landed  property  reveals  an  undoubted 
tendency  toward  concentration.  The  agricultural  population  is 
losing  its  homogeneous  composition,  and  is  differentiating  into 
social  strata  of  varying  economic  strength.  In  consequence  of 
the  dissolution  of  the  landed  community,  an  agricultural  prole- 
tariat is  being  born;  and,  driven  by  pressing  needs,  the  peasants 
swell  the  ranks  of  the  proletariat  in  the  cities.  All  this  persuades 
us  that  Russia  has  entered  upon  the  same  course  of  social- 
economic  development  which  western  Europe  too  has  traversed. 
The  ever-increasing  influence  of  international  commerce  forces 
us  to  borrow  from  the  more  advanced  countries  such  means  and 
forms  of  production  as  have  been  reached  elsewhere  only  through 
a  slow  and  gradual  evolution.^^  This  connection  of  our  economy 
with  that  of  the  world  makes  any  prediction  as  to  the  possible 
limit  of  development  for  our  capitalism  even  in  the  remote  future 
quite  impossible.''^  We  can  only  say  that  when  the  hour  shall  have 
struck  for  the  abolition  of  capitalistic  property  in  western  Europe, 
and  the  "  expropriation  of  the  expropriators  "  shall  have  begun, 
it  will  be  necessary  for  our  production  also  to  be  reorganized  in 
accordance  with  socialistic  principles. 

Meanwhile,  "the  common  aim  of  the  Russian  revo- 
lutionary socialists  is  the  same  as  that  of  the  socialists  of 
all  countries :  "  socialization  of  the  means  of  production 

^^  This  statement  makes  allowance  for  the  populistic  view  —  the 
possibility  of  a  briefer  evolutionary  period  for  Russia  ;  i.  e.,  a  cer- 
tain originality  in  the  Russian  mode  of  development. 

"  This  is  another  compromise  between  populism  and  social 
democracy,  both  of  which,  knowing  surely  what  would  be  the  future 
of  capitalism  in  Russia,  held  quite  opposite  views  as  to  that  future. 


THE  SOCIALISTIC  IDEA  431 

as  an  aim,  social  revolution  by  the  people  as  a  means, 
and  the  socialistic  labor  party  as  a  necessary  weapon. 
But  the  necessary  condition  for  forming  a  labor  party 
—  namely,  a  "democratic  constitution"  —  is  lacking 
in  Russia,  and  it  must  first  be  won.  The  "actual 
force  "  for  this  struggle  is  in  Russia,  again,  the  same  as 
abroad  —  the  proletariat.  But,  since  at  present  the 
j'liral  part  of  the  country  is  not  easily  accessible  to 
propaganda  —  owing  to  a  comparatively  low  degree  of 
culture,  as  well  as  to  dispersion  and  isolation  from  the 
intellectual,  political,  and  industrial  centers  —  our  chief 
attention  must  be  given  to  the  proletariat  in  the  cities  — 
to  the  workingmen  in  the  industries.  In  their  midst 
revolutionary  circles  have  to  be  started,  which  shall 
form  the  nucleus  of  a  future  labor  party,  and,  "  united 
to  socialistic  circles  of  the  intellectuals,"  shall  form 
what  we  call  "the  socialistic-revolutionary  party."  In 
these  last  two  phrases  the  new  point  of  view  of  the 
future  "  socialistic  democrats  "  is  being  reached  without 
entirely  abandoning  the  former  point  of  view  of  the 
populists. 

Such  was  the  state  of  feeling  and  doctrine  in  the 
socialistic  camp  when,  some  few  years  later,  the  new 
period  of  struggle  began.  Any  attempts  at  reconcilia- 
tion were  at  once  forgotten.  Both  factions  of  Russian 
socialism  reappeared,  each  with  its  characteristic  doc- 
trines and  methods  of  action,  and  fighting  and  compet- 
ing with  each  other  more  bitterly  than  ever  before. 
But  these  quarrels  were  by  no  means  a  mere  repetition 
of  the  old  ones.  We  shall  see  how  new  dissensions 
were  brought  about  by  new  and  important  practical 


432  RUSSIA  AND  ITS  CRISIS 

issues ;  and  how  a  new  step  forward  was  taken  by  Rus- 
sian socialism,  though  its  stage  of  pohtical  education  is 
still  far  from  complete.^^ 

"^  See  chap,  vii,  pp.  481   ff. 


CHAPTER   VII 

THE  CRISIS  AND  THE  URGENCY  OF  REFORM 

We  now  know  what  the  social  forces  are,  and  the 
poHtical  schemes  and  theories,  that  condition  the  com- 
ing reform  in  Russia.  Some  of  these  social  forces  — 
namely,  those  of  the  higher  social  strata  —  we  have 
seen  to  be  too  weak  to  force  reforms  upon  the  govern- 
ment through  their  social  influence.  The  other  forces 
—  namely,  those  inherent  in  the  lower  social  strata  — 
we  have  found  to  be  as  yet  too  little  organized.  There- 
fore, should  any  reform  commend  itself  by  virtue  of  its 
intrinsic  usefulness  and  urgency,  there  would  be  immi- 
nent danger  of  its  being  indefinitely  postponed  —  as  has 
actually  been  the  case  up  to  the  present  time.  The 
chances  for  the  immediate  realization  of  reform  being 
too  small,  it  was  only  natural  for  us  to  find  the  very 
schemes  for  reform  unsuited  for  such  immediate  reali- 
zation, either  because  they  were  not  definite  enough  for 
practical  purposes  —  which  was  generally  the  case  with 
the  liberal  programs  —  or  because  they  were  too  defi- 
nite ;  i.  €.,  abstract  and  extreme.  Of  course,  this  would 
be  changed  at  once,  if  some  impelling  force  could  be 
found  to  bring  the  lethargic  social  elements  and  the 
torpid  political  schemes  into  action.  It  now  remains  for 
us  to  investigate  whether  some  such  force  really  exists ; 
and,  if  it  does,  to  weigh  its  possible  consequences. 

There  are  two  chief  agencies  which  will  make  politi- 
cal action  effective  —  the  growth  of  material  want  and 
the  growth  of  political   disaffection ;    and   these  will 

433 


434  RUSSIA  AND  ITS  CRISIS 

render  reform  unavoidable.  Material  want,  growing 
more  and  more  acute,  finally  takes  the  shape  of  a 
general  crisis  —  agricultural,  industrial,  and  financial. 
Political  disaffection,  becoming  permanent,  forms  an 
atmosphere  of  social  unrest  which  finds  expression  in 
individual  or  combined  violent  action.  A  political  con- 
dition which  has  not  only  proved  to  be  powerless 
against  the  crisis  and  the  social  unrest,  but  which  has 
even  notoriously  contributed  to  the  former  and  fostered 
the  latter,  has  by  this  shown  itself  to  be  incompatible 
with  the  gratification  of  the  most  elemetitary  social 
needs.  This  order  of  things  is  thenceforth  doomed. 
And  it  writes  its  own  sentence  when,  in  the  very  midst 
of  a  crisis  and  a  state  of  social  unrest,  it  is  driven,  by 
no  one's  fault  but  its  own,  into  an  unsuccessful  war. 
These  agencies,  not  unmentioned  in  our  previous 
exposition,  must  now  be  studied  more  closely.  What 
is  the  Russian  crisis?  And  what  is  the  Russian  social 
unrest?  An  attempt  to  elucidate  these  questions  is  not 
an  act  of  indiscretion  toward  my  countrymen.  The 
crisis  is  now  being  chirped  about  even  by  the  sparrows 
on  the  roofs,  and  is  being  studied  by  government  com- 
mittees and  discussed  in  hundreds  of  publications.  The 
social  unrest  cannot  be  too  strongly  emphasized  before 
an  audience  that  enjoys  the  privilege  of  being  well 
informed  by  a  free  press,  and  of  thus  knowing  much 
more  about  it  than  many  an  average  citizen  of  my  own 
country  can  ever  hope  to  know.  Unhappily,  it  is  not 
from  knowing  too  much,  but  from  knowing  too  little, 
that  we  suffer  in  Russia;  and  the  danger  is  not  for 
those  who  know  that  a  position  is  untenable,  but  for 
those  who  hesitate  to  surrender  an  untenable  position 
in  time  to  prevent  their  own  destruction. 


The  Changes  in  Peasant  Prosperity  in  the  Period  1861-1900 


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WKKM  "^c  greatest  ^^^H 


THE  URGENCY  OF  REFORM  435 

We  begin,  then,  with  the  agricultural  crisis,  which 
lies  at  the  bottom  of  all  other  crises  in  a  country  such 
as  Russia.  Rapid  as  has  been  of  late  the  development 
of  Russian  industry,  Russia  still  remains  an  essentially 
agricultural  country.  About  80  per  cent,  of  her  inhabi- 
tants are  peasants  and  support  themselves  by  hus- 
bandry. Nearly  the  same  figure  expresses  the  share  of 
the  rural  products  (grain,  cattle,  poultry)  in  Russia's 
export  trade.  Any  important  change  in  this  export 
may  seriously  affect  the  balance  of  trade,  and  thus 
strengthen  or  ruin  the  country's  finances.  The  large 
industries  depend  chiefly  on  the  village  customers,  and 
bad  or  good  crops  bring  with  them  prosperity  or  stag- 
nation to  manufacture.  Taxation,  credit,  marriages 
and  increase  of  population,  and  what  not,  depend  on  the 
state  of  agriculture. 

Now,  everybody  in  Russia  knows  that  the  state  of 
agriculture  is  extremely  unsatisfactory.  The  map, 
which  gives  a  general  idea  of  it,  summarizes  a  long 
and  voluminous  investigation  of  that  subject,  just  pub- 
lished by  the  government.  It  represents  the  changes 
in  the  prosperity  of  the  peasants  during  the  forty  years 
(1861-1900)  which  have  elapsed  since  their  emancipa- 
tion. The  neutral  (yellow)  tone  represents  the  local 
change  which  coincides  with  the  average  change  for 
the  whole  of  Russia.  On  each  side  of  that  neutral  tint, 
three  bright  (red)  and  three  dark  (blue)  colors,  pro- 
gressively deepening,  represent  the  three  increasing 
degrees  of  amelioration  or  deterioration  in  one  or 
another  particular  province  of  Russia.  Let  us  first 
observe  that  even  the  average  figures  for  the  whole  of 
Russia  often  testify  to  a  state  of  decay.     Thus:    (i) 


436 


RUSSIA  AND  ITS  CRISIS 


The  size  of  the  landholdings  allotted  by  the  commune 
to  each  member  has  shrunk,  in  comparison  with  i860 
(the  figure  for  the  latter  year  being  taken  for  100),  to 
54.2  per  cent.  (2)  The  crops  of  grain  and  potatoes 
have  since  1861  diminished  to  94.4  per  cent.  (3)  The 
number  of  cattle  on  a  unit  of  arable  land  has  since  1870 
diminished  to  90.7  per  cent.  (4)  The  consumption  of 
alcohol  has  since  1870  diminished  to  67.7  per  cent. 
(5)  Arrears  of  taxes,  which  formed  22  per  cent,  of  the 
yearly  payments  in  1871-80,  have  increased  to  117 
per  cent. ;  or,  taking  the  first  figure  for  100,  to  532  per 
cent.  (6)  In  1886-90  the  average  emigration  was  178 
to  every  10,000  of  the  natural  growth  of  population; 
in  1896-1900,  972;  or,  taking  the  first  figure  for  100, 
an  increase  of  546  per  cent. 

Let  it  be  remembered  that  these  figures  represent 
the  average  changes  for  the  whole  of  Russia,  coinciding 
with  those  marked  on  the  map  in  the  yellow  tint.  Much 
more  ominous  ones  meet  us  when  we  examine  con- 
ditions in  the  provinces  colored  blue,  as  shown  in  the 
followinof  table : 


Minimum 


1 .  Allotments  diminished  from  i  oo  to 

2.  Crops  diminished  to 

3.  The  number  of  cattle  diminished  to 

4.  The  consumption  of  alcohol  diminished  to  ... . 

5.  Arrears  of   taxes  increased  from  22  per  cent, 
to  172-444  per  cent.,  or  from  100  to 

6.  Emigration  increased  from   17.8  per  cent,  to 
126.1-360.I  per  cent.,  or  from  100  to 


Besides  these  conditions,  common  to  all  Russia, 
two  others  may  be,  mentioned  which  are  particularly 
unfavorable  in  these  decaying  regions,  while  the  aver- 


The  Present  State  of  Peasant  Prosperity  (1900)  Compared  with  the  Average 

State  for  the  Whole  of  Russia 


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Lower  than  the  Average        Higher  than  the  Average 

{HUH  Greatest  ^^^H 


THE  URGENCY  OF  REFORM 


437 


age  for  the  whole  country  is  rather  favorable,  or  iK^t 
positively  unfavorable : 


Minimum 


7.  Agricultural  wages  (average  increase,  1 08.3  per 
cent.)  decreased  since  1871 

8.  Inner  migrations  —  permissions  for  temporary 
change  of  residence  —  in  order  to  find  employ- 
ment (average  increase,  5.5  times  since  1861) 
increased  


100% 


8  times 


64 -SJ^ 


23.9  times 


All  these  figures  refer  only  to  the  agricultural  popu- 
lation—  the  peasants  of  the  Russian  villages.  But 
why,  one  may  ask,  should  particularly  the  agriculturist 
of  southeastern  Russia  be  suffering  from  this  deteriora-- 
tion,  while  the  provinces  of  the  other  half  of  Russia 
shine  in  bright  colors,  testifying  to  their  comparative 
prosperity  ?  In  reply  to  this  question  I  must  first  point 
out  that  the  prosperity  of  the  northern  peasant  is  only 
comparative;  /.  e.,  his  condition  has  not  grown  much 
worse  —  or  has  grown  a  little  better  —  than  it  had  been 
in  the  beginning  of  the  period  to  which  the  map  refers. 
But  already  by  that  time  (1861)  it  was  not  at  all 
satisfactory.  On  the  map  showing  absolute  degree  of 
welfare  in  1900  will  be  noticed  another  distribution  of 
colors :  the  northwest  of  Russia  is  not  so  bright,  and 
the  southeast  is  not  so  dark  —  with  the  exception  of  the 
black  spot  in  the  south-central  part  —  as  on  the  former 
map.  This  means  that  the  northwestern  peasant,  in 
spite  of  a  general  amelioration  of  his  condition  in  the 
last  forty  years,  is  yet  not  well  off ;  whereas  the  south- 
eastern peasant,  in  spite  of  the  general  deterioration  of 
his  state,  still  possesses  some  resources  for  living;  and 
the  peasant  of  the  south-central  portion  bears  the  full 


438  RUSSIA  AND  ITS  CRISIS 

weight  of  the  crisis,  as  in  his  case  the  lowest  level  of 
present  well-being  is  combined  with  the  highest  degree 
of  deterioration  during  the  last  forty  years.  The  ex- 
planation of  all  these  differences  must  be  sought  in  the 
fact  that  the  Russian  crisis,  is  first  and  foremost  an 
agricultural  one.  The  northwestern  peasant  knows 
how  to  make  both  ends  meet,  because  he  has  long  been 
accustomed  not  to  rely  upon  his  agricultural  work 
alone.  The  southeastern  peasant,  on  the  other  hand, 
lives  exclusively  on  the  products  of  the  soil ;  but  in  his 
case  agriculture  gives  some  profit,  because  the  natural 
productivity  of  the  soil  is  not  yet  exhausted ;  while  the 
peasant  of  the  south-central  regions,  still  depending  on 
the  produce  of  agriculture  alone,  lives  from  hand  to 
mouth,  because  his  soil  is  already  exhausted. 

We  shall  still  better  understand  the  deeper  reason 
for  the  differences  just  stated,  if  we  remember  that  they 
nearly  coincide  with  the  differences  arising  in  the  pro- 
cess of  the  settlement  of  Russia.^  Northwestern  Rus- 
sia is  the  region  of  the  most  ancient  colonization ;  the 
south-central  districts  were  settled  later  (after  the 
middle  of  the  sixteenth  century)  ;  and  the  southeastern 
part  still  later  (in  the  eighteenth  and  nineteenth  cen- 
turies). As  a  result,  in  the  northwestern  portion  the 
agricultural  stage  of  economic  development  has  long- 
since  passed,  giving  place  to  the  industrial  stage;  while 
in  the  south-central  territory  it  is  only  now  passing 
away,  and  in  the  southeastern  part  it  has  not  yet  passed. 
The  richer  any  of  the  three  parts  is  in  natural  resources, 
the  poorer  it  is  in  human  industry,  and  vice  versa;  and, 
of  course,  the  situation  is  most  acute  in  the  intermediate 

^  See  chap.   i. 


THE  URGENCY  OF  REFORM  439 

Strip  of  land,  where  the  natural  resources  have  been 
exhausted,  while  industry  has  not  yet  had  time  to 
develop. 

The  situation  was  rendered  particularly  acute  by 
the  increased  rapidity  of  this  transition  from  the  agri- 
cultural to  the  industrial  stage.  The  causes  of  this 
increased  rapidity  of  transition  from  the  so-called 
"domestic  economy,"  or  "natural,"  stage  to  that  of 
"  exchange  economy  "  in  Russia  are  many,  and  they  are 
pretty  complicated.  The  most  important  causes  are 
the  demands  of  the  rapidly  growing  state,  and  the  situa- 
tion of  Russia  among  the  economically  more  developed 
nations  wnth  w-hich  she  has  had  to  compete  in  the  inter- 
national market. 

Briefly  stated,  the  agrarian  crisis  in  Russia  is  the 
necessary  consequence  of  two  agents :  the  elemen- 
tary state  of  public  economy,  and  the  increased  strain 
exerted  on  it  by  the  demand  of  the  state  and  by  the 
changed  conditions  of  life.  As  a  result,  private  ex- 
penditures have  greatly  increased,  while  private  in- 
comes have  remained  the  same  as  before,  or  have  even 
diminished,  owang  to  the  exhaustion  of  the  natural 
resources,  the  increase  of  population,  the  condition  of 
the  foreign  market,  etc.  Hence  the  balance  between 
revenue  and  expense  has  been  quite  disturbed.  This  is 
the  crisis  reduced  to  its  simplest  terms.  Let  us  proceed 
to  a  more  detailed  explanation. 

Prior  to  the  emancipation  of  the  peasants,  forty 
years  ago,  economic  life  in  Russia  still  preserved  its 
mediaeval  character.  It  was  based  on  home  produc- 
tion for  home  consumption  —  at  least  so  far  as  peasant 
life  was  concerned.      The  outlay   for   food,   lodging. 


440  RUSSIA  AND  ITS  CRISIS 

clothing,  fuel,  and  light  —  in  short,  for  all  the  chief 
items  of  the  family  budget  —  was  practically  naught. 
A  man  paid  nothing  for  his  own  hovel ;  he  fed  on  the 
products  of  his  own  field  and  garden ;  he  was  amply 
supplied  with  homespun  clothing  made  of  the  wool  of 
his  own  sheep  and  of  the  fiber  of  his  own  flax ;  he  did 
not  spare  the  wood  to  keep  hot  the  old-fashioned, 
enormous  oven  which  filled  a  quarter  of  the  house,  and 
which  during  the  long  winter  months  turned  it  into  a 
bathhouse;  nor  did  he  spare  his  eyes,  for  he  lit  the 
interior  of  the  hut  with  thin  chips  constantly  renewed 
in  a  stand  of  prehistoric  shape,  during  the  long  winter 
evenings  while  the  women  spun  threads  on  their  distaffs 
and  spindles.  Now,  however,  all  this  has  changed. 
Wooden  chips  have  given  way  to  a  kerosene  "smoker;  " 
homespun  linen  has  been  superseded  by  calicoes,  while 
woolen  stuffs  have  disappeared  without  a  substitute; 
fuel  has  become  very  scarce  and  expensive.  Food  — 
which  consists  of  vegetable  products  alone  —  is  insuffi- 
ciently supplied;  too  often  it  has  to  be  bought  by  the 
grain-producers  themselves ;  in  fact,  so  often  that  the 
question  has  seriously  been  raised,  and  has  been  an- 
swered in  the  affirmative  by  a  body  of  learned  econ- 
omists, whether  it  is  not  better  for  the  Russian  pro- 
ducers to  have  low  grain  prices. 

Why  have  the  conditions  of  life  thus  changed  ?  In 
Russia  you  may  sometimes  hear  the  explanation,  on 
the  part  of  the  former  landlords,  that  it  is  because  the 
Russian  peasant  has  become  lazy;  that  he  is  now  a 
spendthrift,  since  nobody  is  there  to  take  care  of  him. 
This  is  adduced  as  a  reason  why  the  peasant  prefers  the 
factory  products  to  those  of  his  own  making.    The  fact 


THE  URGENCY  OF  REFORM  441 

is  that  the  peasant  now  is  too  poor  to  utilize  his  and  his 
family's  work  for  himself:  and,  at  the  same  time,  he 
has  no  more  raw  material  for  his  home  industry.  He 
can  no  longer  have  his  clothes  prepared  by  the  w^omen 
of  his  own  family,  because  he  has  no  more  wool  or 
linen  to  spare.  His  new^  expenses  for  the  factory  calico 
are  certainly  not  inspired  by  any  taste  for  fancy  articles, 
but  by  mere  necessity ;  and  his  purchases  are  generally 
cheap  and  of  inferior  quality.  He  can  hardly  be  accused 
of  lavishness  on  the  ground  that  he  has  to  buy  some 
food  in  the  market,  since  the  fact  is  that  on  an  average 
his  yearly  consumption  is  still  below  the  necessary  mini- 
mum. He  gets  only  about  twenty-three  to  twenty-six 
Russian  poodsr  of  grain,  and  sometimes  even  as  little 
as  fifteen,  while  the  soldiers  are  entitled  to  not  less  than 
twenty-nine  poods.  Moreover,  the  Russian  peasant 
does  not  eat  wheat,  which  he  produces  for  sale  only, 
but  rye  or,  more  frequently,  potatoes.  While  the  pro- 
duction of  grain  in  general  is  now  only  88  per  cent,  of 
what  it  was  forty  years  ago,  the  potato  crop  is  more 
than  three  times  as  large.  Thus,  his  buying  of  grain  in 
the  market  only  shows  that  the  Russian  peasant  is 
obliged  to  sell  the  better  sorts  to  cover  other  necessary 
expenses ;  or  that  he  is  compelled  to  sell  at  one  time  in 
order  to  buy  at  another  (and  this  at  a  loss,  as  we  sliall 
soon  see)  ;  or  that  upon  his  holdings  he  is  unable  to 
produce  even  the  necessary  minimum  of  food.  To  be 
sure,  he  will  not  be  found  buying  meat,  because  on  the 
average  he  eats  meat  only  four  times  a  year.  If  he  still 
finds  money  to  buy  alcohol  —  the  famous  vodka  —  it  is 
not  because  he  is  a  drunkard,  but  because  vodka  is  con- 

^  A  pood  is  thirty-six  English  pounds. 


442  RUSSIA  AND  ITS  CRISIS 

sidered  by  the  Russian  to  be  as  necessary  for  social 
entertainment  as  soda  and  whisky  in  the  American 
ckibs.  And  yet  the  consumption  of  alcohol  is  lower  in 
Russia  than  in  any  other  civilized  country,  and,  as  we 
have  seen,  is  still  decreasing. 

Thus,  such  purchases  in  the  market  as  we  have 
enumerated  are  absolutely  compulsory.  The  increase 
in  the  peasant's  cash  expenditure  for  food,  clothing, 
light,  etc.,  does  not  at  all  signify  any  rise  in  his 
standard  of  life  or  any  enhancement  of  his  material 
well-being;  on  the  contrary,  it  is  a  symptom  of  the 
deterioration  of  his  condition.  This  will  become  still 
more  evident  upon  a  closer  examination  of  that  most 
important  item  of  the  peasant's  expenditure,  the  one 
which  conditions  all  others;  namely,  his  payment  of 
taxes. 

If  the  Russian  peasant  has  no  time  to  work  for 
himself;  if  he  is  fatally  underfed  and  underclothed ;  if 
he  needs  money  badly,  it  is,  first  and  foremost,  because 
he  is  compelled  to  perform  his  functions  as  a  taxpayer. 
He  does  his  best  to  pay  his  taxes ;  and  if,  in  spite  of  all 
his  exertions,  he  accumulates  arrears  upon  arrears,  it  is 
not  because  he  will  not,  but  because  he  cannot,  pay.  In 
the  decade  1883-92,  while  the  population  increased  16 
per  cent.,  taxation  increased  29  per  cent. ;  i.  e.,  nearly 
twice  as  much;  and  in  the  following  decade,  1893- 
1902,  while  the  growth  of  the  exhausted  population 
still  further  fell  off,  the  increase  being  only  13  per  cent., 
taxation  took  an  unheard-of  upward  leap,  showing  an 
increase  of  49  per  cent.,  or  nearly  four  times  as  much. 
No  wonder  then  that,  while  in  1871-80  every  dessyatin 
(2.70  acres)  of  the  land  owned  by  the  peasant  owed  to 


THE  URGENCY  OF  REFORM  443 

the  state  19  cents  in  arrears,  in  1881-90  this  debt  had 
increased  to  24  cents,  and  in  1 891-1900  to  54  cents. 
We  must  add  that  ordinarily  the  authorities  collect  the 
taxes  by  compulsory  sales  before  allowing  the  arrears 
to  accumulate.  Thus  the  peasantry  is  reduced  to  a 
state  of  chronic  insolvency,  and  finally  grows  quite 
apathetic.    As  a  writer  says : 

Any  further  diminution  of  the  property  of  the  peasants  in  the 
middle  provinces  would  hardly  seem  possible,  because  nothing  is 
left  that  can  be  sold  [by  the  authorities,  to  pay  the  arrears].  Thus 
the  peasants'  contribution  to  the  exchequer  has  decreased,  not  by 
law,  but  by  the  force  of  circumstances.  The  peasants  now  pay 
only  what  they  can,  not  what  they  ought  to ;  for  the  whole 
amount  of  taxes  can  in  no  way  be  collected.  The  worst  of  it  is 
that,  being  insolvent,  the  peasants  are  anxious  not  to  save  any- 
thing that  may  be  sold  for  taxes.  This  hopeless  state  of  poverty, 
unavoidable  and  unalterable,  takes  away  every  wish  to  save  or  to 
raise  the  standard  of  life,  even  if  a  possibility  presented  itself. 
The  practical  sense  of  the  peasants  permits  them  to  improve 
nothing  but  the  buildings,  because  these,  whether  they  are  good 
or  poor,  cannot  be  sold  for  arrears.  And  so  the  peasants  do  not 
strive  to  earn  money  for  any  other  purpose  of  private  economy, 
and  if  they  acquire  some,  they  very  sensibly  prefer  to  squander  it 
rather  than  to  hand  it  over  to  the  collector. 

This  is  by  no  means  an  exaggerated  view  of  the 
situation.  The  words  quoted  are  the  testimony  of  an 
agrarian  and  an  old-style  landlord,  Mr.  Bekhtayev  —  a 
man  who  thoroughly  knows  the  Russian  village,  and 
who  is  determined  to  tell  the  truth,  which  can  no  longer 
be  concealed.  Below  we  cite  another  opinion,  taken 
from  the  official  minutes  of  a  committee  appointed  by 
the  Tsar  to  inquire  into  the  real  state  of  things,  and 
presided  over  by  the  present  minister  of  finance,  Mr. 
Kokovtsev.     At  one  of  its  meetings  (October,  1903), 


444  RUSSIA  AND  ITS  CRISIS 

the  following  statement  was  made  by  one  of  the  fore- 
most authorities  on  that  subject,  Mr.   Schwanebach: 

As  a  result  of  the  overtaxation  of  the  last  decade,  from  the 
nine  central  and  eastern  governments  of  Russia  the  exchequer 
received  only  407  million  rubles,  instead  of  the  full  amount  of  450 
millions  due.  Thus  the  arrears  made  up  more  than  15  per  cent, 
of  the  assessed  sum.  It  is  evident  that  the  population  was 
actually  unable  to  pay  more  than  it  really  did.  In  fact,  they  did 
not  even  pay  this  sum,  because  at  the  very  time  the  government 
was  obliged  to  spend  about  203  millions  for  feeding  the  same 
population.  Thus  the  exchequer  was  able  to  keep  only  half  of 
what  was  paid,  and  its  real  loss  was  44  per  cent,  of  the  amount 
assessed.  The  overcharge  in  taxation  is  evidently  aimless,  and  it 
would  be  better  to  leave  the  money  with  the  population. 

Things  having  come  to  such  a  pass,  the  government 
was  obliged  to  intervene  and  to  abolish  such  part  of  the 
taxation  as  it  was  powerless  to  collect.  The  unsatis- 
factory state  of  rural  economy  was  acknowledged  as 
early  as  1873,  by  a  government  commission.  Ten 
years  later,  at  the  initiative  of  a  liberal  minister  of 
finance,  Mr.  Bunge,  an  attempt  was  made  to  alleviate 
the  burden  of  direct  taxation.  First  of  all,  the  heavy 
redemption  tax  ( for  land  bought  from  the  landlords  by 
the  peasants,  with  the  pecuniary  help  of  the  state)  was 
somewhat  reduced,  the  northern  half  of  Russia  profit- 
ing most  by  the  reform.  Then  the  antiquated  capita- 
tion tax,  introduced  by  Peter  the  Great,  was  abolished. 
The  general  decrease  of  the  direct  taxation  from  1882 
to  1885,  caused  by  these  reforms  of  Mr.  Bunge,  was 
about  50  millions,  or  from  150  to  100  millions.  Thus, 
at  present  the  amount  of  direct  taxes  forms  only  two- 
thirds  of  what  it  was  before  Mr.  Bunge's  reform.  But 
under  Mr.  Bunge's  successor,  Mr.  Veeshnegradskee, 


THE  URGENCY  OF  REFORM         445 

the  policy  of  the  government  was  abruptly  reversed. 
To  meet  the  deficit  in  the  budget,  a  large  increase  in 
indirect  taxation  was  resorted  to,  which  took  back  from 
the  peasantry  more  than  had  just  been  granted  them. 
The  excises  and  customs  paid  into  the  treasury  (1885- 
95)  a  valuable  yearly  addition  of  309.8  millions;  i.  c, 
six  times  as  much  as  had  been  taken  from  it  by  Mr. 
Bunge's  reform.  The  successor  of  Mr.  Veeshnegrad- 
skee,  Mr.  Witte,  went  still  farther.  He  not  only  re- 
tained and  enlarged  the  system  of  indirect  taxes,  which 
he  found  to  be  paid  "  voluntarily "  and  "  fairly  to 
correspond  to  the  paying  powers  "of  the  population, 
but  he  made  it  his  leading  maxim  "  not  only  to  satisfy 
the  current  demands  of  the  state  out  of  the  yearly  in- 
come, but  to  collect  a  certain  free  surplus."  Mr.  Witte 
indeed  succeeded  jn  collecting  as  "  free  surplus  "  more 
than  one  billion  rubles  in  eight  years  (1893-1900),^ 
which  he  brilliantly  spent  in  the  protection  of  the  large 
industries  and  the  introduction  of  the  gold  standard, 
while  at  the  same  time  he  was  obliged  to  feed  the  starv- 

^  During  the  period  of  1895-1900  the  yearly  surplus  of  the 
"ordinary"  receipts  over  "ordinary"  expenditures  was  188.5  mil- 
lions a  year,  while  for  the  seven  antecedent  years,  1888-94,  it  was 
only  83.7  millions,  and  in  1881-87  there  had  been  a  yearly  deficit  of 
24.5  millions.  These  surpluses  of  1895-1900  were  swallowed  up  by 
"extraordinary"  expenses,  which  for  the  six  years  1895-1900 
amounted  to  a  yearly  sum  of  221.2  millions  over  and  above  the 
"extraordinary"  revenues,  while  in  1888-94  they  were  only  59.8 
millions,  and  in  1881-88  (the  period  of  the  ministry  of  Mr.  Bunge) 
there  remained  an  annual  balance  of  25.7  millions.  Thus,  by  his 
ingenious  device  of  secreting  "  free  sums  "  from  the  regular  budget, 
Mr.  Witte  formed  an  "  extraordinary "  budget  of  his  own,  much 
more  pliant  to  his  personal  policy  than  would  have  been  the  "  ordi- 
nary "  budget  duly  distributed  among  the  chief  central  offices  of  the 
State.     What  this  personal  policy  was  will  be  shown  later. 


446  RUSSIA  AND  ITS  CRISIS 

ing  rural  population  and  to  deal  with  the  enormously 
increasing  arrears.  For  the  first  purpose  275  millions 
have  been  spent  by  the  treasury,  and  314  millions  more 
were  lost  through  the  remission  of  unpaid  arrears. 
The  population,  though  unable  to  pay  direct  taxes,  still 
contributed  to  the  treasury  by  buying  liquors,  tea, 
sugar,  matches,  kerosene,  and  the  products  of  the  pro- 
tected industries  :  iron,  cotton  manufactures,  etc.  The 
real,  the  financial,  crisis  was  to  begin  only  when  that 
buying  power  was  exhausted  and  the  Russian  peasants 
had  to  curtail  their  expenses.  Unhappily,  this  is  now 
the  case. 

We  have  seen  that  the  consumption  of  alcohol  has 
considerably  decreased.  This  cannot  be  explained  by 
any  spread  of  temperance,  as  there  are  no  teetotalers  in 
Russia,  and  the  temperance  societies  are  not  permitted 
to  interfere  with  this  revenue.  The  government  made 
some  fruitless  attempts  at  increasing  the  rate  of  excise, 
and  thus  gaining  in  higher  price  what  it  was  unable  to 
gain  by  increased  sales.  As  the  consumption  was  still 
continuously  diminishing,  the  government  at  last  re- 
solved to  take  the  sale  of  intoxicants  into  its  own  hands ; 
i.  e.,  to  introduce  a  state  monopoly,  in  order  to  save  the 
revenue. 

The  consumption  of  sugar  is  slowly  increasing 
(from  8  pounds  per  capita  in  1890  to  13  pounds  in 
1901),  but  it  is  yet  far  behind  that  of  other  civilized 
countries  (in  Germany  and  in  France,  27  pounds;  in 
the  United  States,  69;  in  England,  79).  However,  the 
increase  in  consumption  cannot  keep  pace  with  the 
protected  production  of  sugar.  The  surplus,  therefore, 
is  permitted   to  be  exported  —  at  a   lower  price,   of 


THE  URGENCY  OF  REFORM  447 

course,  than  that  commanded  in  the  interior  market. 
But  this  loss  is  made  good  by  the  premium  paid  to  the 
exporter  by  the  government.  Thus  a  Russian  customer 
pays  $1.34  for  the  same  quantity  of  sugar  that  is  ex- 
ported at  the  price  of  65  cents  —  just  one-half.  There 
is  a  current  saying  in  Russia,  that  English  pigs  enjoy 
the  privilege  which  is  refused  the  Russian  peasant; 
namely,  that  of  being  fed  on  Russian  sugar.  There  is 
the  same  difference  in  price,  to  the  detriment  of  the 
Russian  customer,  in  the  case  of  tea,  iron,  and  a  dozen 
other  articles  of  prime  necessity. 

All  of  the  foregoing  leads  to  one  unavoidable  con- 
clusion :  that  the  necessity  of  buying  and  spending  has 
greatly  increased,  while  at  the  same  time  the  prices  of 
products  and  the  rates  of  taxes  have  likewise  risen 
enormously.  Thus  a  large  portion  of  the  peasant's 
expenses  has  to  be  met  with  money.  On  the  other 
hand,  we  know  that  he  is  short  of  money  and  cannot 
meet  this  increased  demand.  But  we  cannot  realize 
how  great  his  distress  is  until  we  inquire  into  the 
sources  of  his  income,  as  we  have  already  done  in  the 
case  of  his  expenditures. 

The  chief,  if  not  the  only,  product  which  can  be 
raised  and  sold  is  grain;  and  thus  we  return  to  the 
condition  of  Russian  agriculture.  We  shall  soon  see 
that,  while  the  expenditure  has  increased,  this  basis  of 
the  peasant's  income  has  materially  weakened.  The 
only  question  is  as  to  what  extent  agriculture  and  the 
sale  of  grain  constitute  the  sole  basis  of  the  peasant's 
budget.  And  this  question,  as  we  have  already  seen,  is 
differently  answered  in  the  case  of  northern  and  south- 
ern Russia. 


448  RUSSIA  AND  ITS  CRISIS 

In  the  northern  half  of  Russia  the  peasant  long  ago 
learned  how  to  derive  from  additional  sources  what  his 
unfruitful  soil  refused  to  yield  him.  As  early  as  the 
eighteenth  century,  and  even  earlier,  he  began  to  find 
subsidiary  employment  in  transportation,  in  the  build- 
ing and  home  industries,  or  in  petty  trade.  Thus, 
before  the  emancipation,  a  Russian  peasant  from  the 
middle  Volga  out  of  every  dollar  earned  did  not  receive 
more  than  12.37  cents  from  husbandry.  For  the  re- 
maining 87.63  cents  he  had  to  depend  on  subsidiary 
industries.  That  is  why,  after  the  liberation,  he  did  not 
find  himself  entirely  lost  under  the  new  conditions  of 
life,  but,  in  spite  of  the  enormously  increased  demand 
for  money,  still  found  means  to  cover  his  expenses. 

With  the  peasant  of  the  southern  half  of  Russia  it 
turned  out  quite  differently.  He  did  not  know  so  well 
how  to  earn  money  and  relied  entirely  on  tilling  the 
land,  which  was  much  more  fertile  here,  in  the  "  black- 
soil  "  region,  than  in  the  northern  country  of  clay  and 
sand.  His  landlord,  even  in  olden  times,  did  not  per- 
mit him  to  go  to  town  or  abroad  in  search  of  employ- 
ment. As  a  rule,  he  kept  him  upon  the  manor,  not 
even  giving  him  any  allotment  for  private  tilling,  as 
was  the  general  practice  in  northern  Russia.  Thus  the 
peasant  was  obliged  to  pay  his  lord  in  kind,  by  manual 
labor,  much  more  than  he  might  have  had  to  pay  in 
specie. 

Now,  when  the  hour  struck  for  liberation,  the 
northern  landlord  was  ready  to  sell  to  his  peasant  as 
much  of  his  unproductive  soil  as  the  latter  might  desire, 
provided  that  the  peasant  redeemed  himself  by  paying 
for  his  holding  more  than  the  soil  was  worth.     At  the 


THE  URGENCY  OF  REFORM  449 

same  time,  the  southern  landlord  withheld  from  his 
field  laborers  as  much  blacksoil  land  as  he  could,  doling 
out  to  him  as  small  a  lot  as  possible,  for  which,  how- 
ever, the  peasant  had  to  pay  a  very  high  price.  Thus 
poorly  equipped,  the  southern  peasant  went  out  to  meet 
the  new  era.  The  demands  on  him  were  the  same  as 
on  his  northern  brother.  He  had  to  get  money  —  as 
much  as  he  could  —  since  there  was  no  landlord  to  pay 
his  taxes.  But,  unlike  his  northern  brother,  he  had 
nothing  to  sell  besides  his  grain.  And  the  conditions 
for  producing  and  selling  grain  had  grown  decidedly 
worse. 

In  the  first  place,  the  per  capita  area  on  which 
grain  may  be  sown  had  greatly  diminished  throughout 
Russia.  The  average  peasant  allotment  in  i860  was 
6.21  acres,  while  forty  years  later,  owing  to  the  increase 
of  population,  it  was  only  3.51  acres.  Yet  even  this 
amount  would  not  have  been  entirely  insufficient,  if  an 
intensive  system  of  agriculture  could  have  been  resorted 
to.  But  with  the  three-field  system  in  use  —  one-third 
of  the  arable  land  always  lying  fallow,  while  the  other 
two-thirds  are  badly  tilled  and  worse  manured  —  the 
productivity  of  this  small  lot  is  not,  on  the  average, 
sufficient  to  yield  enough  food  for  the  laborer  and  his 
horse.  The  average  crop  is  16.6  poods  of  grain  per 
inhabitant,  while  not  less  than  20  poods  are  necessary 
to  feed  him ;  and  the  average  yield  of  oats  is  23.6  poods 
per  horse,  while  not  less  than  40  poods  are  needed. 
The  returns  are  thus  17  and  41  per  cent.,  respectively, 
less  than  they  should  be  in  order  that  men  and  animals 
may  not  be  underfed,  let  alone  the  possibility  of  sale 
and  export.    At  the  same  time,  on  this  small  lot,  under 


450  RUSSIA  AND  ITS  CRISIS 

the  system  of  tillage  in  vogue,  the  working  power  of 
man  and  horse  cannot  be  used  to  its  full  extent.  Every 
laborer  can  till  about  39  acres,  yet  he  actually  does  till 
only  8  —  i.  e.,  nearly  five  times  less;  and  thus  79  per 
cent,  of  his  working  capacity  remains  unemployed  upon 
his  plot  of  land.  A  horse  can  till  lo-ii  acres;  yet  its 
labor  is  generally  employed  on  an  area  one-third  of 
that. 

The  insufficiency  of  food  is  thus  in  a  strange  way 
associated  with  an  abundance  of  working  power.  To 
find  additional  food  and  to  spend  additional  work  in 
producing  it,  two  methods  are  possible :  either  to  in- 
crease the  productivity  of  the  given  plot,  or  to  increase 
the  plot  itself.  But  the  productivity  of  the  soil  cannot 
be  increased  without  new  investment  of  capital,  if  even 
we  admit,  what  many  writers  do  not  grant,  that  such 
increase  is  possible  at  all  on  lands  in  communal  owner- 
ship and  in  precarious  possession  of  the  single  culti- 
vator. Now  the  peasant  in  distress  does  not  possess 
any  capital,  and  rural  credit  for  improving  land  does 
not  exist  in  Russia.  The  other,  and,  under  existing 
conditions,  the  only  possible,  method,  is  to  buy  or  rent 
additional  plots  of  land.  This  has  always  been  the 
most  ardent  desire  of  the  peasants,  and  a  real  struggle 
for  buying  or  renting  land  has  been  going  on  during  the 
whole  period  under  consideration.  Owing  to  the  large 
number  of  estates  of  nobles  offered  for  sale,^  and  also 
to  the  material  help  of  the  Peasants'  Bank  (since  1883), 
the  agriculturists  have  succeeded  in  increasing  the 
property  of  the  peasant  communes  since  1875  t>y  10 
per  cent.  But  even  though  we  add  such  land  as  has 
been  purchased  by  individual  peasants,  independently 

*  See  p.  240. 


THE  URGENCY  OF  REFORM  451 

of  the  communal  allotments,  which  would  increase  the 
amount  by  another  13  per  cent.,  this  general  increase 
of  23  per  cent,  does  not  prove  equal  to  the  increase  of 
the  peasant  population  during  the  same  period,  which 
was  48  per  cent.,  or  more  than  double.  As  a  result,  the 
holdings  have  constantly  decreased,^  and  it  became 
necessary  to  rent  neighboring  land.  This  necessity  has 
been  so  great,  and  opportunities  for  renting  land  have 
been  so  comparatively  few,  that  rent  has  risen  enor- 
mously. Contrary  to  the  laws  of  classical  economy,  the 
rent  has  not  only  reached  the  amount  of  the  "  unearned 
increment,"  but  has  far  exceeded  it,  swallowing  up  the 
profits  and,  very  often,  the  very  w^ages  of  the  tenants. 
Instances  are  numerous  where  tenants  pay  as  rent  one, 
three,  or  even  five  dollars  more  per  dessyatin  than  the 
land  would  yield  as  net  profit,  if  tilled  by  hired  labor.*' 
Such  exorbitant  rent  may  be  compared  to  what  is 
known  to  have  been  the  case  in  Ireland  before  the  great 
famine  of  1846-47,  when  the  competition  among  the 
tenants  "  reminded  one  of  a  struggle  for  food  in  a 
besieged  city  or  on  a  ship  in  open  sea."  The  same  kind 
of  competition  is  going  on  among  the  Russian  peasants, 

^  See  pp.  436  f. 

'  For  instance,  in  all  but  two  of  the  districts  in  the  province  of 
Nishnee-Novgorod  the  rent  is  higher  than  the  net  profit  would  be, 
sometimes  being  one  and  a  half  to  three  times  as  high  ;  e.  g.,  rent 
$1.43  and  net  profit  only  $0.47  from  each  dessyatin  (district  of 
Gorbatov)  ;  $1.76  and  $1.01  (Ardatov)  ;  $2.97  and  $2.14  (Sergach)  ; 
$1.45  and  $0.86  (Nishnee-Novgorod)  ;  and  so  on.  In  the  province 
of  Orel  the  same  dessyatin  that  would  yield  $4-38,  if  tilled  by  hired 
labor,  may  be  rented  by  indigent  peasants  for  $7.60.  In  the  province 
of  Voronash  the  difference  in  some  districts  is  $5.23  (net  profit)  to 
$7.26  (rent),  or  $8.01  to  $9.26.  In  the  five  districts  of  the  province 
of  Poltava  the  difference  is  sometimes  ^3.72  to  $5.61. 


452  RUSSIA  AND  ITS  CRISIS 

owing  to  the  absolute  insufficiency  of  their  plots  for 
mere  subsistence.  Of  course,  no  profits  are  looked  for 
from  such  renting,  the  only  aim  of  the  peasants  —  and 
the  only  economic  explanation  of  the  possibility  of  such 
a  rent  —  being  to  apply  their  own  and  their  horses' 
gratuitous  labor  to  produce  some  more  grain  for  their 
sustenance.  Otherwise  this  possibility  of  subsidiary 
work  would  be  lost,  and  both  man  and  horse  must 
starve.  No  wonder  that  they  count  their  work  as 
nothing. 

The  acute  character  of  this  competition  in  the  rent- 
ing of  land  shows  of  itself  that  the  chance  for  renting 
is  slim,  and  that  all  the  needs  cannot  be  supplied  from 
that  source.  The  average  proportion  of  leased  land 
to  the  communal  allotments  is  very  small,  not  exceed- 
ing 17.4  per  cent,  for  the  whole  of  Russia.  In  the 
southern  half,  where  the  allotments  are  particularly 
small  and  the  rent  is  particularly  high,  the  w^ant  is 
especially  felt. 

What,  noWj  remains  for  the  peasant  after  the  land 
for  sale  or  for  lease  has  been  exhausted?  The  only 
thing  left  for  him  to  do  is  to  leave  his  home  village  and 
to  look  for  other  employment  for  that  working  power 
which  he  cannot  utilize  within  his  own  neighborhood. 
And  here  again  the  great  difference  between  the  south 
and  the  north  of  Russia  manifests  itself.  Men  go  away 
from  both ;  but  they  go  in  different  numbers,  for  differ- 
ent purposes,  and  with  different  results.  In  1900,  14.2 
million  peasants  of  both  sexes  left  their  villages  in 
search  of  employment,  or  32  per  cent,  of  the  whole 
adult  population.  This  proportion  rises  to  more  than 
50  per  cent.  —  more  than  half  of  the  whole  laboring 


THE  URGENCY  OF  REFORM 


453 


population  —  in  the  old  industrial  regions  of  the  north  ; 
while  it  descends  to  less  than  25  per  cent. — one- fourth 

—  in  the  agricultural  regions  of  modern  settlement. 
We  do  not  speak,  remember,  of  emigrants,  but  of 
people  \\ho  merely  went  away  for  a  few  weeks  or 
months,  and  then  returned  with  their  earnings,  thus 
supplying  the  lack  of  money  in  their  families  which 
had  remained  at  home.  The  average  amount  brought 
home  from  their  wanderings  was  about  $38  for  every 
laborer  who  had  left  his  home  (there  being,  on  an 
average,  one  such  member  in  each  family).  But  the 
share  of  the  north  and  the  south  in  this  additional 
earning  was  different.  On  the  whole,  the  work  of  the 
northern  wandering  laborer  was  better  paid  and  better 
placed.  The  difference  in  the  employment  will  be  clear 
from  the  following  table,  where  two  typical  provinces 

—  one  from  the  northern,  the  other  from  the  southern 
half  —  are  compared  as  to  the  vocations  chosen  by  the 
wandering  laborers : 


Vocations 

Province  of 
Tver 
(north) 

Province  of 

Voronash 

(south) 

Employed  in  factories,  trades,  or  personal  service. 
Employed    in   handicrafts    (as   carpenters,   shoe- 
makers, smiths,  fullers,  etc.) 

57.6,'^ 

34-5 
7-9 

8.3^ 
16. I 

Employed  in  agriculture  and  rural  work 

75-8 

From  this  it  is  seen  that  the  order  of  frequency  of 
the  supplementary  vocations  of  the  peasants  in  the  two 
types  of  provinces  is  reversed.  While  such  occupations 
in  the  older  portions  of  Russia  prevailingly  are  factory 
work  and  the  trades,  in  the  younger  provinces  it  is 
rural  work  that  predominates.     This  difference  brings 


454  '     RUSSIA  AND  ITS  CRISIS 

with  it  a  difference  in  earnings,  as  factory  work  is  the 
best  paid.  Those  who  are  fortunate  enough  to  secure 
such  employment  bring  home  on  an  average  $84,  while 
but  $46  is  brought  back  by  such  as  can  be  employed  at 
rural  labor  onlyJ 

But  it  is  not  so  much  the  smaller  pay  that  makes 
agricultural  labor  less  profitable  away  from  home,  as  it 
is  the  greater  uncertainty  of  obtaining  such  work.  The 
supply  of  wandering  farm  hands  is  not  regulated  by 
demand.  Occasionally  the  demand  may  happen  to  be 
large,  and  then  the  wanderers  are  made  welcome  and 
are  liberally  paid.  But  again  it  may  happen  that  there 
is  no  demand;  in  which  case  the  laborers,  who  early 
in  the  spring  may  have  left  places  where  hands  were 
greatly  needed,  run  the  risk  of  returning  in  the  autumn 
as  beggars.  Mere  rumors  of  good  wages  from  prov- 
inces where  crops  happened  to  be  good  the  year  before 
may  direct  the  current  next  year  in  increased  numbers 
to  the  same  places,  where  this  time  the  returns  may  be 
zero.  A  round  million  of  rural  laborers  from  southern 
Russia  every  year  incur  the  peril  of  being  ruined  by 
this  blind  play  of  chance. 

From  everything  that  has  so  far  been  said  about 
the  sources  of  income  of  the  peasant  it  might  be  con- 
cluded that  no  grain  is  sold  in  the  village,  and  that  all 
money  comes  from  outside  work  and  wages.  Such  a 
conclusion  would  not  quite  correspond  to  the  truth.  It 
is,  indeed,  a  fact  that  Russian  peasants  have  nothing  to 

'  The  least  profitable,  of  course,  are  the  home  industries,  for 
the  same  reason  that  make  renting  land  unprofitable ;  namely,  that 
the  work  is  done  at  home,  and  that  only  such  leisure  time  is  taken  for 
it  as  cannot  be  put  to  other  use  ;  —  and  that  thus  it  is  not  rewarded 
at  its  full  value. 


THE  URGENCY  OF  REFORM  455 

sell  from  their  own  farm  products,  which  do  not  suffice 
for  their  own  need.  Yet  it  is  also  true  that  grain  is 
sold,  because  the  money  brought  home  by  the  wander- 
ing hands  is  not  sufficient  to  cover  the  necessary  ex- 
penditures for  rent  and  taxes.  Great  as  is  the  value 
in  use  of  this  part  of  the  peasant's  budget,  we  must 
consider  its  value  in  exchange.^  We  must  also  con- 
sider the  production  of  grain  for  sale  for  the  further 
reason  that  the  peasants  are  far  from  being  the  only 
producers.  There  are  many  private  estates  —  such, 
for  instance,  as  those  belonging  to  the  nobility  and  to 
private  proprietors  of  the  other  classes  —  that  rely  en- 
tirely on  selling  grain.  These  are  not  troubled  with  an 
insufficiency  of  allotments  nor  with  a  surplus  of  human 
and  horse  power  in  need  of  employment.  And  yet 
they,  too,  are  affected  by  the  general  crisis,  thus  bear- 
ing witness  to  other  causes  for  the  distress  than  those 
already  described  —  those  due  to  special  conditions  of 
the  peasants'  rural  economy.  Let  us  now  inquire  into 
such  causes  of  the  crisis  as  are  common  to  all  pro- 
ducers of  grain  to  members  of  communes  and  to  private 
proprietors  alike. 

The  fact  is  that  the  production  of  grain  for  export 
is  on  the  verge  of  becoming  unprofitable  in  Russia,  as 
it  cannot  stand  foreign  competition,  first,  because  the 
productivity  of  the  soil  under  the  given  conditions  of 
tillage  is  too  small,  and,  secondly,  because  the  prices 

*  It  must  be  borne  in  mind  that  only  a  very  small  part  of  the 
crops  is  sold  abroad.  In  1890-94  the  amount  of  grain  exported  was 
only  15.1  per  cent,  of  the  average  harvest.  Of  this  amount,  wheat 
constituted  34.3  per  cent.;  barley,  30;  oats,  10. i  ;  rye  —  the  chief 
nourishment  of  the  people  and  numerically  predominating  over  the 
others  —  only  3  per  cent. 


456 


RUSSIA  AND  ITS  CRISIS 


of  grain  have  fallen  too  low  to  cover  the  expense  of 
production,  and  particularly  the  cost  of  transportation, 
which  in  Russia  is  very  badly  organized. 

The  average  harvest  returns  in  Russia  are  lower 
than  those  of  other  grain-producing  countries.  The 
following  table  shows  the  figures  (in  poods  from  one 
dcssyatin)  : 


Russia 

United  States 

Canada  

Germany  .  . . . 
Sweden  .... 


Wheat 

Rye 

28.2 

32.8 

60.3 

42.0 

62.3 

62.0 

77.0 

56.4 

100.2 

75-9 

Oats 


39-0 

63.1 

97-7 
73-9 
83.2 


The  price  of  exported  grain  (chiefly  wheat)  is 
steadily  falling,  as  can  be  seen  from  the  following 
figures : 


Grain  exported  (in  thousands  of /oo(/.0  . 
Money  earned  (in  thousands  of  rubles). 
Average  price  per  pood  (in  rubles) . . . . 


18SI 

IS86 

202,709 

242,281 
1. 19 

278,546 

233-350 

0.84 

617,242 

369,383 
0.59 


It  would  take  too  long  to  explain  why  these  figures 
are  what  they  are.  and  what  should  be  done  to  change 
the  unfavorable  position  of  Russia  in  the  international 
grain  market.  Let  us  only  observe  that  of  the  two 
symptoms  of  inferiority  just  mentioned,  the  second  — 
2.  c,  the  price  of  grain  —  is  absolutely  uncontrollable. 
The  Russian  producer  cannot  control  the  prices,  be- 
cause he  cannot  wait.  He  must  sell  at  any  price,  there 
being  no  facilities  for  storage,  not  even  for  the  land- 
lord, let  alone  the  peasant,  who  often  is  obliged  to  sell 


THE  URGENCY  OF  REFORM  457 

at  a  very  low  figure  in  the  autumn  only  to  buy  again  at 
a  higher  price  in  the  spring.  The  former  symptom  — 
the  low  productivity  of  the  soil  —  of  course,  can  be 
changed,  but  only  in  the  long  run,  and  by  greatly  in- 
creased governmental  activity  and  private  initiative. 
As  a  matter  of  fact,  however,  governmental  activity  is 
headed  in  the  opposite  direction  —  that  of  protecting 
industry,  not  agriculture;  and  private  initiative  is 
checked  by  the  political  system  for  the  self-defense  of 
autocracy. 

The  productivity  of  the  land  must  be  increased  — 
this  is  the  general  cry  in  Russia.  But  when  it  comes  to 
the  question  of  how  to  do  it,  opinions  differ  widely. 
Some  few  people  think  that  it  is  the  private  proprietors 
—  the  nobles  —  and  not  the  peasants  of  the  communes, 
that  must  be  relieved  first,  as  it  is  on  their  estates  that 
new  systems  of  tillage  are  tried,  and  as  it  is  they  who 
produce  grain  for  export  and  not  for  their  own  con- 
sumption. The  peasants  v;ill  then  of  their  own  accord 
follow  the  example  of  the  large  owners.  But  even  the 
Russian  agrarians  admit  that  the  difficulty  is  wide- 
spread and  is  felt  particularly  by  the  peasantry.  On 
the  other  hand,  they  must  admit  that,  as  far  as  they 
themselves  are  concerned,  the  crisis  cannot  be  relieved 
by  the  easy  means  of  borrowing  government  money  at 
low  interest,  as  they  invariably  have  insisted  upon 
doing  in  the  past.  The  most  stubborn  among  them  are 
beginning  to  understand  that  this  method  of  repairing 
the  "great  injustice"  of  having  forced  them  to  liber- 
ate their  peasants,  forty  years  ago,  is  not  at  all  the 
right  way  out  of  the  crisis.    Even  such  writers  as  sym- 


458  RUSSIA  AND  ITS  CRISIS 

pathize  with  the  agrarians  (Mr.  Goorko,  for  instance) 
are  compelled  to  acknowledge  that  cheap  state  credit 
has  only  helped  to  consummate  their  ruin.  The  credit 
they  now  desire  is  for  agronomic  amelioration  alone, 
subject  to  a  strict  control  by  the  state.  Another  of 
these  writers  (Mr.  Bekhtayev)  points  rather  to  the 
organization  of  the  trade  in  grain  by  the  state,  by 
tariffs,  elevators,  cheaper  transportation,  trade  conven- 
tions and  facilities. 

But  all  parties  are  agreed  that  these  are  far  from 
being  the  best  methods  of  dealing  with  the  problem. 
When,  about  seven  years  ago,  this  question  was  raised 
by  a  private  committee  of  agrarians,  it  immediately 
became  clear  that  the  crisis  was  universal,  and  that  no 
measure  would  do  which  failed  to  take  into  considera- 
tion the  condition  of  peasant  agriculture.  It  is  the 
purchasing  power  of  the  chief  taxpayer  that  is  to  be 
raised  —  by  raising  his  selling  power;  his  only  product 
is  to  be  increased  in  quantity,  if  it  is  not  to  be  raised  in 
price.  But  this  is  not  to  be  achieved  without  a  com- 
plete overthrow  of  all  his  antiquated  habits  of  tilling 
the  land.  Can  this  be  accomplished  without  previously 
educating  him?  Can  it  be  accomplished  within  the 
limits  of  his  ancient  form  of  owning  land  by  com- 
munes? Can  it  be  left  to  his  own  initiative,  or  must 
the  state  take  the  lead  ?  What  are  the  means  for  pro- 
moting the  peasant's  initiative?  Is  this  initiative  to 
be  permitted  entirely  free  play,  or  rather  are  the  inter- 
ests of  the  whole  to  be  protected  by  special  legislation 
against  private  encroachments?  These  are  a  few  of 
the  many  questions  which  arise  in  connection  with  the 
idea  of  a  radical  change,  and  which  are  being  eagerly 


THE  URGENCY  OF  REFORM  459 

discussed.  What  is  the  position  of  the  government 
in  the  face  of  these  discussions? 

For  a  better  understanding  of  this  question,  we 
must  pass  to  the  consideration  of  another  side  of  the 
crisis :  the  crisis  in  the  industries  which  are  more 
especially  protected  by  the  government,  and  which  now 
follow  agriculture  in  the  general  collapse. 

We  have  seen  that  the  protection  of  industries 
proved  one  of  the  most  important  causes  of  the  agri- 
cultural crisis,  since  it  considerably  increased  the  prices 
of  commodities  without  creating  a  corresponding  in- 
crease in  the  purchasing  power  of  the  customers.  So 
long  as  this  purchasing  power  was  thought  to  be 
practically  unlimited,  the  Russian  government  was 
always  on  the  side  of  protection,  in  order  to  secure  for 
itself  a  favorable  balance  and  large  custom  revenues. 
Of  course,  the  theoretical  argument  —  of  "developing 
the  productive  forces"  and  "organizing  production 
upon  a  national  basis"  —  has  never  been  wanting.  As 
a  result,  many  branches  of  industry  have  been  fostered 
which  were  unable  to  exist  —  or  to  thrive  —  without 
artificial  help  from  the  state.  Claims  for  the  protection 
of  manufactures  have  been  very  strongly  supported 
by  the  influential  circles,  and  protectionist  legislation 
has  gone  on  increasing  since  time  immemorial.  It 
began  with  the  foundation  of  Russian  factories  by 
Peter  the  Great,  and,  with  the  two  temporary  inter- 
ruptions of  1819  and  1857  (the  "free  trade"  tariffs 
having  been  immediately  repealed),  it  reached  the 
present  phase  of  enforced  protection  beginning  with 
the  "gold  customs"  of  1876  and  culminating  in  the 
prohibitive  tariff  of  1891.     The  following  figures  are 


460 


RUSSIA  AND  ITS  CRISIS 


officially  given  by  Mr.  Witte  as  indicating  the  growth 
of  manufactures  (in  millions  of  rubles)  :^ 


Industries 


Textiles  

Food  products   

Animal  products. . . 
Wooden  products.  . 
Paper  products.  . . . 
Chemical  products. 

Ceramics 

Metallic  products  . 
Other  industries. . . 


Total 5410 


1877 


[illions 

Millions 

297.7 

464.2 

17.0 

37-9 

67.7 

79.6 

16.8 

2S-7 

12.7 

21.0 

10.5 

21-5 

20.4 

29.0 

8q.3 

112. 6 

8.6 

10.4 

Millions 
581.6 
47-9 
72.6 
33-3 
25-5 
355 
32.3 
162.3 

195 


802.0     1,010.0     1,816.0 


1897 


Millions 

946.3 
95-7 

132.0 

102. 9 
45-5 
59.6 
82.6 

3IO-6 
4T.0 


Or,  to  show  the  average  yearly  increase : 

1878-87 26.1 

1888-92 41-6 

1893-97 161 . 2 

Thus  it  is  under  the  administration  of  Mr.  Witte 
that  the  development  of  Russian  industry  has  reached 
its  climax.  The  mighty  leap  to  the  last  figure  of  161 
millions  —  four  times  as  much  as  the  average  yearly 
increase  of  the  preceding  decade  —  could  not  have 
been  performed  by  the  efforts  of  the  Russian  capitalists 
alone.  To  achieve  that,  Mr.  Witte  had  recourse  to 
foreign  capital.  How  much  the  share  of  foreign  capi- 
talists in  Russian  undertakings  has  increased  of  late 
may  be  seen  from  the  following  data,  which  were 
compiled  by  a  Russian  author  (Mr.  Ole)  in  a  book 
destroyed  by  the  Russian  censorship  : 

YEARLY    SUPPLY    OF    FOREIGN    CAPITAL 

Rubles 
1851-88      1,561,000 

"The  figures  (in  millions  of  rubles)  given  by  Mr.  Witte  for 
single  branches  of  industries  are  as  follows  (see  his  report  to  the 
Tsar  of   1900)  : 


THE  URGENCY  OF  REFORM  461 

Rubles 
1889-94   5,306,000 

1895   21,070,000 

1896   52,490,000 

1897   39,726,000 

1898   97,770,000 

1899   93,391,000 

In  forty-four  years  (1851-94)  taken  together  the 
supply  of  foreign  capital  (91,250,000)  was  not  equal 
to  the  influx  of  each  of  the  last  two  years  (1903-4). 

Some  people  may  have  cherished  the  hope  that 
foreign  capital  would  introduce  with  it  the  European 
regime  of  competition,  thus  lowering  the  prices  of 
commodities  for  the  benefit  of  the  Russian  customer, 
and  by  and  by  accustoming  the  Russian  capitalist  to  be 
satisfied  with  smaller  profits.  But  foreign  capital  was 
attracted  to  Russia  by  the  opposite  hope  of  profiting 
by  the  existing  high  rates,  and  it  adapted  itself  admir- 
ably to  the  Russian  conditions  of  production  protected 
by  prohibitive  customs.  The  Russian  customer,  who 
was  already  paying  a  tariff  on  imported  merchandise 
—  nearly  three  times  as  much  as  he  had  to  pay  before 
the  last  era  of  protection  began  (about  13  per  cent. 
ad  valorem  before  1876,  and  about  34  per  cent,  after 
the  tariff  of  i89i=about  170  millions  in  specie)  — 
had  also  to  pay  all  the  dividends  of  the  new  enterprises. 
For  instance,  the  cost  of  cotton  manufactures  amounted 
to  about  123  million  rubles  yearly  over  and  above  what 
they  would  have  cost  without  protection ;  that  is,  an 
increase  of  28.5  per  cent.  In  another  branch  of  manu- 
facture which  particularly  attracted  foreign  capital, 
the  metal  industry,  the  output  was  intended  to  cover 
the  direct  orders  of  the  government.     Here  the  divi- 


462  RUSSIA  AND  ITS  CRISIS 

dends  were  not  less  than  40  per  cent.  To  support  the 
new  enterprises  in  that  branch,  government  railways 
were  built  on  a  large  scale.  The  population  again  had 
to  pay  —  this  time  in  the  form  of  increased  taxes.  The 
minister  of  finance  then  argued  that  "one  must  not  be 
hindered  by  a  temporary  strain  on  the  paying  power  of 
the  population,  which  would  be  amply  rewarded  by  the 
respective  accretion  of  means  for  the  further  increase 
and  development  of  this  very  power."  The  phrase 
may  sound  well  in  a  handbook  of  political  economy; 
unfortunately,  it  was  used  in  a  report  to  the  Tsar,  and 
it  served  to  cover  the  fiasco  of  the  whole  system  — 
which  had  become  too  evident,  even  to  the  naked  eye. 
Just  then,  at  the  close  of  the  nineties,  the  "  paying  " 
and  the  "purchasing"  power  of  the  population  proved 
to  be  so  exhausted  that  the  protected  industries  them- 
selves began  sorely  to  feel  the  consequences.  The 
crisis  had  come;  industry  had  to  face  (relative)  over- 
production. Even  government  orders  for  rails  and 
rolling-stock  could  not  be  secured  indefinitely.  The 
railway  mileage  was  doubled  in  ten  years  (from 
28,800  versts  in  1892  to  53,000  versts  in  1902).  The 
expense  to  the  exchequer  for  building  this  network 
amounted  to  more  than  one  billion  (1,005  niillion 
rubles).  The  financial  result  was  a  corresponding  in- 
crease in  the  Russian  indebtedness  and  almost  yearly 
deficits  in  the  operation  of  new  railways;  the  whole 
loss  amounting  in  twenty  years  to  600  million  rubles  — 
or  30  millions  a  year  —  without  counting  the  interest 
and  amortization  of  the  corresponding  part  of  the 
public  debt.  The  economic  result,  instead  of  an  in- 
crease in  the  "  paying  power  "  of  the  ruined  peasantry, 


THE  URGENCY  OF  REFORM  463 

was  that  the  raihvays  brought  to  the  markets  cheaper 
grain  from  newly  broken  fields  in  the  extreme  eastern 
parts  of  European  Russia,  and  thus  served  still  further 
to  deteriorate  the  condition  of  the  producer  in  the 
central  provinces  by  the  additional  hardship  of  home 
competition. 

Under  these  conditions,  the  government  found  it 
difificult  to  support,  on  the  former  large  scale,  metal- 
lurgic  enterprises  started  under  its  auspices.  The 
comptroller-general,  in  his  confidential  report  to  the 
Tsar  for  the  year  1902,  stated  that,  besides  facilitating 
the  conditions  of  loan  and  discount  to  meet  the  crisis, 
the  National  Bank  had  been  obliged  to  advance  funds  to 
support  the  metal  industries,  though  by  its  statutes  it 
was  not  permitted  to  do  so.  These  advances  were  41 
million  rubles  in  1900,  75  million  in  1901,  and  100 
million  in  1902.  Out  of  the  sums  advanced  in  1901, 
9  millions  were  already  considered  as  lost  to  the  bank, 
and  more  losses  were  feared.  The  comptroller- 
general's  conclusion  was  that,  "though  the  crisis  was 
not  at  all  without  issue,  it  was  doubtless  the  result  of  a 
too  rapid  and  too  artificial  growth  of  industry,  which 
had  far  surpassed  the  absorbing  power  of  the  interior 
market."  To  expand  the  interior  market,  and  for  this 
purpose  to  improve  the  condition  of  agriculture,  was 
the  comptroller's  advice  to  the  Tsar.  And,  indeed,  the 
ministry  of  finance  tried  to  sermonize  its  moneyed 
clientele,  advising  them  to  look  for  petty  purchasers  in 
the  home  market,  and  to  abandon  the  hope  of  further 
aid  from  the  treasury.  Big  orders  were  stopped.  Of 
course,  the  capitalists  who  had  invested  their  money 
in    the    metal    industries    became    utterlv    dissatisfied. 


464  RUSSIA  AND  ITS  CRISIS 

They  did  not  intend  to  cater  to  the  retail  trade,  and 
petty  purchasers  were  few  —  not  because  the  peasants 
did  not  want  iron,  but  because  they  were  unable  to  pay 
for  it,  at  least  unable  to  pay  two  or  three  times  the 
prices  paid  in  England.  Thus,  without  even  attempt- 
ing to  organize  production  on  the  new  basis  of  peasant 
demand,  many  foreign  investors  preferred  to  go  out  of 
business  and  transfer  their  money  elsewhere.  The 
general  cry  abroad  now  was :  "  There  are  no  cus- 
tomers in  Russia  but  the  government."  This  was  the 
result  of  the  government's  attempt  to  increase  the 
"paying  power"  of  the  peasant  by  means  of  making 
him  pay  more  for  supporting  the  industries. 

In  countries  enjoying  a  higher  degree  of  industrial 
development  the  device  would  have  been  to  look  for 
foreign  markets.  But  this  is  not  possible  for  the  Rus- 
sian manufacturers,  for  the  reasons  noted  above. 
Russian  industry  is  conditioned  by  that  regime  of 
protection  which  brought  it  into  existence.  With  its 
high  cost  of  production,  its  still  higher  profits,  and  an 
inferior  organization  of  the  whole  mechanism  of 
exchange,  it  cannot  bear  competition,  and  thrives  only 
behind  "  closed  doors,"  No  commercial  conquests  have 
been  possible  for  it  —  except  some  neighboring  mar- 
kets in  central  Asia,  where  Russian  trade  has  been  at 
home  for  two  centuries. 

The  "  foreign  market "  thus  afforded  no  outlet  for 
Russian  industry  in  times  of  crisis.  In  the  end  the 
idea  of  mastering  their  home  market  must  dawn  upon 
the  Russian  manufacturers,  since  protection  alone  has 
proved  insufficient  to  secure  for  them  the  domestic 
customer.     Up  to  this  moment  the  interests  of  agri- 


THE  URGENCY  OF  REFORM  465 

culture  and  industry  have  been  supposed  to  be  antago- 
nistic. Now  that  the  purchasing-  power  of  the  Russian 
customer  has  been  exhausted,  the  mutual  interdepend- 
ence of  the  two  has  for  the  first  time  become  clear. 
The  question  of  expanding  the  home  market  by  other 
means  than  a  constant  increase  of  the  prices  of  com- 
modities forces  itself  upon  our  attention.  Can  and  will 
Russian  capitalists  solve  this  question  themselves,  or 
must  they  receive  an  additional  impulse,  such  as  might 
come  from  the  loosening  of  the  grip  of  protection  ?  In 
1899  Mr.  Witte  gave  this  optimistic  answer: 

Protectionism  —  as  a  means,  not  as  an  end  in  itself  —  can 
have  only  temporary  importance,  until  the  aim  is  reached  for 
which  it  was  intended.  The  natural  death  of  protectionism  will 
come  when  a  sound  national  industry  has  been  created  and  an 
effective  competition  has  been  originated  within  the  realm.  The 
logical  consequence  of  protectionism  is  its  self-annihilation. 

There  are,  however,  some  people  who  doubt 
whether  this  optimism  of  the  former  minister  of  finance 
was  well  founded.  His  ovv'n  financial  policy  certainly 
did  not  tend  to  pave  the  way  for  the  result  which 
he  predicted.  As  a  political  philosopher  he  may  have 
successfully  foretold  the  development  of  competition 
and  the  self-annihilation  of  protectionism;  but  as 
minister  of  finance  he  did  everything  in  his  power  to 
invigorate  its  decaying  vitality  —  by  protecting  syndi- 
cates, paying  premiums  on  exports,  etc. ;  thus  main- 
taining high  prices  in  spite  of  overproduction,  and 
eliminating  that  free  play  of  competition  which  in  his 
eloquent  scheme  was  to  act  as  a  destroying  force  upon 
protectionism.  It  was  Mr.  Witte's  merit,  however,  to 
bring  the  question  of  protectionism  to  an  acute  stage 


466  RUSSIA  AND  ITS  CRISIS 

by  dint  of  the  industrial  as  well  as  the  agricultural 
crisis.  Protectionism,  indeed,  must  result  in  "self- 
annihilation,"  or  enforced  annihilation,  in  a  measure  at 
least,  if  the  home  market  were  to  be  won  —  in  the 
interests  of  industry  itself. 

The  financial  policy  of  Mr.  Witte  was  consistent  — 
not  with  his  eloquent  schemes,  but  with  his  ministerial 
policy  as  protector  of  the  great  industries.  The  Rus- 
sian Necker  —  Mr.  Bunge  —  had  inaugurated  the  era 
of  deficits;  the  Russian  Calonne  had  come  to  prove 
that  Russia  possessed  credit  —  by  constantly  borrowing 
and  enormously  increasing  the  public  debt;  and  also 
to  prove  that  the  Russian  nation  had  money  —  by 
increasing  taxation,  and  by  letting  the  starving  popu- 
lation pay  a  billion  of  *'  free  surplus  "  into  the  treasury. 

It  now  remains  to  consider  the  financial  crisis  in 
Russia.  The  agrarian  crisis  is  already  there;  the 
industrial  crisis,  owing  to  protection,  is  less  acute,  but 
is  nevertheless  present.  The  financial  crisis,  happily, 
has  not  yet  come,  though  all  its  elements  are  surely  at 
hand.  It  will  be  fairer,  however,  to  consider  the 
financial  policy  of  Russia,  not  from  the  point  of  view  of 
its  consequences,  which  may  have  been  disastrous,  but 
first  from  the  point  of  view  of  its  aims,  which  were 
intended  to  be  beneficial.  In  America  it  is  more  fully 
realized  than  anywhere  else  that  the  currency  question, 
more  than  any  other,  may  be  solved  in  a  way  which 
seems  to  some  people  beneficial,  while  others  will  find 
the  same  solution  disastrous.  This  question  has  been 
a  vital  one  to  many  generations  of  Russian  financiers, 
and  it  was  the  merit  of  Mr.  Witte  to  solve  it  by  sub- 
stituting the  gold  standard  for  the  depreciated  paper 


THE  URGENCY  OF  REFORM  467 

currency.  Thus  public  confidence  was  restored  and  the 
Russian  standard  of  vakie  made  permanent.  This  is 
certainly  a  merit.  But  everything-  has  its  drawbacks; 
and  the  negative  side  of  Air.  Witte's  achievement  was 
its  result  of  throwing  us  —  to  use  the  terms  of  Presi- 
dent Walker  —  from  "irredeemable  and  fluctuating 
paper  currency  —  that  alcohol  of  commerce"  into  "the 
fast-tightening  folds  of  the  contracting  money  supply." 
Thus  one  more  element  of  confusion  was  added  to  the 
general  —  and  particularly  the  agricultural  —  crisis. 

In  olden  times  Russia  had  a  steadily  expanding  sil- 
ver currency.  The  supply  of  money  was  constantly 
growing,  owing  to  the  invariably  favorable  balance  of 
trade ;  and  this  increase  of  silver  coin  w  as  felt  the  more 
since  the  original  supply  in  former  centuries  had  been 
insufficient.  Thus  the  purchasing  power  of  silver  fell 
very  rapidly.  It  is  now  from  fifteen  to  eighteen  times 
less  than  it  was  four  hundred  years  ago,  and  from 
three  to  four  times  less  than  three  hundred  years  ago. 
The  prices  of  commodities  rose  accordingly.  But  since 
the  time  of  Peter  the  Great  silver  has  been  only  the 
legal,  or  nominal,  standard.  Credit  money  formed  the 
actual  currency,  owing  to  the  military  expenses  of  the 
government,  which  could  not  be  met  without  resorting 
to  credit,  while  no  credit  abroad  existed,  and  no  con- 
tracting of  a  public  debt  was  possible  at  that  time. 
Thus  in  the  period  from  Peter  to  Catherine  II.  copper 
money  made  up  the  currency,  and  silver  disappeared. 
Then  Catherine  II.  introduced  national  paper  money 
(the  "assignats"),  which  rapidly  depreciated  as  new 
issues  were  resorted  to,  to  meet  the  expenses  of  the 
wars  with  Turkey  and  —  during  the  reign  of  Alex- 


468  RUSSIA  AND  ITS  CRISIS 

ander  I.  —  with  Napoleon.  An  attempt  was  made  (in 
1843)  by  a  minister  of  Nicholas  I.  (Kankrin)  to  do 
away  with  this  inconvertible  paper  money  by  redeem- 
ing it  at  its  (depreciated)  market  value,  three  and  a 
half  times  less  than  its  face  value  in  silver.  But  even 
at  the  price  of  this  partial  state- bankruptcy,  the  gov- 
ernment did  not  succeed  in  restoring  the  silver  cur- 
rency, as  the  new  state  notes  (one  for  each  three  and  a 
half  of  the  former  ones)  were  kept  convertible  only 
until  the  next  (the  Crimean)  war;  whereupon  they 
again  became  a  sort  of  forced  state  loan  without  inter- 
est and  without  any  guarantee  as  to  their  redeemability 
at  their  face  value.  As  a  result,  confidence  was  again 
lost,  and,  owing  to  unlimited  issues,  the  new  bank  notes 
depreciated. 

That  such  a  currency  was  quite  unworthy  of 
a  civilized  country;  that  by  its  fluctuations  it  greatly 
hampered  trade  and  commerce  —  particularly  that  with 
foreign  countries;  that  it  made  the  circulation  of 
money  an  object  of  speculation,  and  thus  brought  Rus- 
sian finance  into  dependence  on  foreign  bankers  and 
stock  exchanges  —  all  these  objections  to  the  paper 
currency  were  only  too  well  justified  and  made  its 
reform  most  desirable.  What  was  elsewhere  said  by 
economists  in  defense  of  the  principle  of  paper  money 
—  its  elasticity,  as  far  as  the  expansion  and  contraction 
of  its  volume  are  concerned ;  its  convenience ;  its  repre- 
sentative function  as  a  medium  of  exchange,  if  honestly 
and  wisely  managed;  its  capacity  for  serving  as  a 
stepping-stone  to  a  "scientific  currency"  —  all  these 
arguments  could  hardly  be  applied  to  the  traditional 
Russian  method  of  dealing  with  the  paper  currency. 


THE  URGENCY  OF  REFORM  469 

But  certain  class  interests  were  closely  interwoven 
with  the  working  of  the  old  paper  currency,  and  these 
were  to  suffer  from  the  coming  reform.  They  were 
the  same  as  those  represented  by  the  People's  Party  in 
the  United  States  when  this  party  advocated  bimetal- 
lism and  the  free  coinage  of  silver. 

In  Russia,  too,  if  the  moneyed  classes  want  an 
unvarying,  theoretically  superior  standard,  the  pro- 
ducing classes  want  specie,  first  and  foremost;  they 
want  money  to  be  present  and  to  be  abundant,  not  to  be 
theoretically  reliable.  If  it  is  "cheap  money,"  so  much 
the  better.  Scarcity  of  money  and  falling  prices  on 
agricultural  products  —  these  we  have  seen  to  be  the 
chief  plagues  of  the  Russian  village,  and  of  Russian 
country  districts  in  general.  They  want  more  money 
—  an  expanding  currency,  likely  to  raise  the  prices. 
Coin  is  good ;  but  paper  is  better,  if  only  it  may  be  had 
in  abundance.  That  is  why  there  has  existed  a  small 
agrarian  party  ready  to  defend  the  old  currency, 
unsatisfactory  as  it  was  from  the  point  of  view  of 
theory,  and  from  that  of  the  manufacturers  as  well. 

But  the  latter  did  not  wait  for  a  reform  of  the  cur- 
rency to  come  to  protect  their  interests.  They  made 
the  government  —  just  as  American  industrialists  did 
in  1862  —  protect  them,  particularly  by  the  "gold 
customs  "  ( 1876),  against  the  fluctuations  of  the  paper 
currency.  In  Russia  as  in  the  United  States  this  was 
the  first  step  toward  a  gold  currency.  But  the  Russian 
industrialists  did  not  need  any  further  steps,  as  every 
facility  for  foreign  trade  and  capital  —  which  a  gold 
currency  was  sure  to  bring  with  it  —  threatened  them 
with  increased  importation  and  competition. 


470  RUSSIA  AND  ITS  CRISIS 

The  gold  duties  on  imports  were  also,  as  we  have 
seen,  the  signal  for  an  enormous  advance  in  the  indus- 
trial field,  which  reached  its  climax  with  the  introduc- 
tion of  the  prohibitive  tariff  of  1891.  This  latter 
marked  the  second  step  toward  the  introduction  of  the 
gold  standard  —  the  more  important  one,  because  its 
direct  aim  was  to  store  up  the  gold  reserve  by  secur- 
ing a  favorable  balance  of  trade  and  a  large  customs 
revenue. 

Then  came  the  critical  year  of  1893  —  the  year  of 
the  silver  crisis  and  of  the  repeal  of  the  Sherman  Act 
of  1890.  The  fact  that  brought  about  the  victory  of 
the  monometallists  in  the  United  States  —  namely,  the 
decision  of  the  Indian  government  to  stop  the  free 
coinage  of  silver  —  also  gave  the  signal  for  the  first 
Russian  measure  of  the  same  kind,  made  public  a 
month  later  (July  28)  by  Minister  Veeshnegradskee. 
Free  coinage  of  silver  was  stopped  in  Russia  by  an 
executive  order,  which  did  not  attract  public  attention, 
just  as  was  the  case  in  America  with  the  surreptitious 
codifying  order  of  1870.  The  remaining  steps  leading 
to  the  introduction  of  the  gold  currency  were  also  taken 
almost  without  opposition.  Russia  had  no  "  Green- 
backers,"  no  "  Farmers'  Alliances,"  no  "  People's 
Party,"  to  defend  the  interests  of  the  producers.  Some 
few  agrarian  publicists,  of  course,  now  decided  to 
abandon  their  advocacy  of  the  paper  currency  and  tried 
to  recommend  the  "cheap  money"  in  the  guise  of  a 
silver  currency.  But  they  came  too  late  (not  until 
1895),  and  were  too  much  suspected  of  "  landlordism," 
to  carry  public  opinion  with  them ;  and  moreover,  they 
found  the  public  mind  too  ignorant  on  questions  of 


THE  URGENCY  OF  REFORM  471 

currency  to  side  with  them.  The  professional  econo- 
mists and  professors  of  political  economy  were  mostly 
on  the  side  of  gold,  and  were  not  to  be  deterred  by 
low  prices  in  agriculture,  which  they  —  in  a  collective 
work  published  by  the  ministry  of  finance  —  even  tried 
to  prove  profitable.  Thus  the  gold  standard  was  defi- 
nitely introduced  in  1895. 

While  introducing  it,  the  ministry  of  finance 
scarcely  foresaw  the  many  exertions  and  sacrifices 
required  to  keep  the  machinery  of  the  new  currency  in 
perfect  operation.  It  was  not  sufficient  to  hoard  up  an 
enormous  mass  of  gold  in  the  treasury.  It  proved 
necessary  constantly  to  be  on  guard  lest  the  country  be 
drained  of  the  much-coveted  metal.  Keeping  up  the 
gold  reserve  became  thenceforth  the  chief  object  of 
financial  solicitude;  all  other  aims  were  made  sub- 
servient to  it;  and  the  administration  thus  became 
slave  to  its  own  reform. 

The  task  was  by  no  means  easy.  With  a  favorable 
balance  of  foreign  payments  a  gold  reserve  is  easily 
kept  up;  but  this  condition  has  never  existed  in  Russia. 
It  is  true  that  our  balance  of  trade,  owing  to  the  pro- 
hibitive duties,  is  generally  in  our  favor;  i.  c,  the 
exports  exceed  the  imports.  But  even  this  surplus  has 
become  noticeably  smaller  during  the  last  decade  — 
just  after  the  prohibitive  tariff  of  1891.  It  seems, 
indeed,  that  protection  has  already  done  what  it  could, 
and  that  no  further  increase  of  duties  can  diminish  the 
demand  for  foreign  merchandise.  Thus,  in  the  five 
years  following  the  introduction  of  the  new  currency 
the  average  surplus  of  exports  was  no  more  than  $48,- 
000,000.     This  could  by  no  means  cover  the  Russian 


472  RUSSIA  AND  ITS  CRISIS 

expenses  abroad.  Twice  this  amount  of  gold,  or  about 
$93,000,000,  is  wanted  merely  to  pay  the  interest  upon 
foreign  loans.  And  then  the  annual  expenses  of  Rus- 
sian tourists  (whose  number  in  the  same  period,  1895- 
1900,  has  increased  from  112,000  to  195,000)  reach 
$30,000,000,  as  a  minimum.  Some  $10,000,000,  at 
least,  must  be  paid  to  the  foreign  investors.  The 
expenses  of  the  government  abroad  (for  the  Russian 
marine,  for  instance)  cannot  be  less  than  $8,000,000. 
These  items  —  though  certainly  attenuated  —  raise  the 
excess  of  Russian  expenses  abroad  beyond  the  profits 
from  foreign  imports  to  the  considerable  sum  of  $93,- 
000,000  a  year.  To  pay  this  balance  out  of  the  gold 
reserve  of  the  treasury  would  be  impossible  without 
compromising  the  currency.  The  only  sound  means 
would  be  to  increase  the  exports.  But  that  would 
mean  —  protection  for  agriculture,  which  alone  does 
the  exporting.  Any  other  remedies  would  be  mere 
palliatives,  or  worse:  they  would  be  very  much  like 
wasting  funds  to  pay  interest  —  temporary  stop-gaps 
inefficient  in  the  long  run. 

The  government  first  tried  to  attract  foreign  gold 
by  inviting  investments;  and  it  was  successful,  as  we 
have  seen;  but  only  for  a  short  time,  and  only  by 
offering  exceptionally  good  terms  and  securing  high 
dividends  to  the  investors.  That  this  meant  increased 
taxation  has  already  been  pointed  out.  Increased  taxa- 
tion, however,  had  its  limit.  This  limit  was  reached, 
when  any  further  increase  proved  impossible.  Even  if 
taxation  should  have  proved  more  efficient  than  it 
actually  did,  it  would  have  been  unable  to  procure  gold ; 
and  it  was  gold  that  was  wanted.     The  only  means 


THE  URGENCY  OF  REFORM  473 

available  for  getting  gold  was  to  contract  foreign  loans, 
and  to  sell  Russian  bonds  and  securities  abroad.  The 
government  was  obliged  to  resort  to  these  means,  if 
for  no  other  reason  than  to  clear  the  balance.  But  this 
was  moving  in  a  circle,  since  every  new  loan,  by  inflat- 
ing the  public  debt  and  the  interest  to  be  paid  on  it  — 
in  gold  —  increased  the  balance  to  be  cleared.  The 
Russian  public  debt  has  already  reached  the  unheard-of 
figure  of  more  than  three  billions,  with  an  interest  of 
more  than  a  hundred  and  twenty-five  million  dollars. 
Our  budget  in  the  ten  years  1893- 1903  has  doubled 
(from  $500,000,000  to  $1,000,000,000).  Taxation 
has  doubled,  too,  with  the  result  that,  after  having 
eaten  up  the  net  profit  of  the  population,  it  is  eating 
into  the  very  core  of  its  subsistence.  The  question  has 
naturally  arisen :  Where  is  all  this  going  to  end? 

Before  the  writer  lie  the  minutes  of  a  plenary  ses- 
sion of  the  State  Council,  December  30,  1902,  met  to 
discuss  the  budget  for  1903.  The  report  does  not  say 
a  word  about  the  skeleton  in  the  closet.  Currency, 
clearing  balance,  foreign  loans,  financial  crisis,  indus- 
trial crisis,  agricultural  crisis  —  not  a  hint  is  given  of 
these  unpleasant  things.  It  discusses  solemnly  the 
necessity  of  economy  in  every  branch  of  the  adminis- 
tration. It  reminds  the  chiefs  of  the  central  bureaus 
that  they  must  not  increase  their  demands  too  rapidly ; 
that  the  government,  "which  has  not  yet  had  time  to 
rise  to  the  proper  level  of  the  economic  w^elfare,"  is 
"powerless"  to  face  such  public  needs  as  the  "re- 
organization of  the  conditions  of  life  of  the  peasant " 
or  the  "assistance  of  the  agricultural  industry."  It 
even  dares  to  admit  that  the  money  s]:)ent  for  construct- 


474  RUSSIA  AND  ITS  CRISIS 

ing  railways  might  have  been  used  to  better  advantage. 
But  there  is  one  thing  about  which  even  these  prudent 
state  councilors  think  it  useless  to  keep  silence.  And 
this  is  the  plain  and  simple  truth  that  the  "paying 
power  "  of  the  population 

has  its  limit,  which  it  is  impossible  to  transgress  without  im- 
periling the  economic  welfare  of  the  country,  on  which  nat  only 
the  national  finances,  but  also  the  internal  force  and  the  inter- 
national   importance    of    the    state,    are    founded At    the 

present  moment  direct  and  indirect  taxation  has  reached  the 
extreme  limit  of  strain.  A  further  burdening  of  the  taxpayers 
would  appear  to  be,  not  only  an  unproductive  measure,  but  even 
hardly  admissible  under  the  existing  economic  conditions.  The 
aim  of  a  sensible  financial  policy  must  be  to  find  means  for 
gradually  alleviating  the  burden  of  taxation;  and,  first  of  all,  to 
reduce  the  rate  of  the  direct  taxes,  particularly  the  redemption 
tax,  with  which  the  poorest  and  most  numerous  class  of  the 
population  is  burdened. 

Evidently,  these  councilors  are  fully  aware  that  a 
reform  must  be  commenced  at  the  bottom,  not  at  the 
top,  if  it  is  to  be  a  serious  reform.  The  agricultural 
crisis  is  at  the  bottom  of  the  other  crises,  and  the 
diminution  of  the  purchasing  power  of  the  peasant  is 
at  the  bottom  of  the  agricultural  crisis.  They  know 
all  that  —  but  they  talk  palliatives.  Is  there  anybody 
who  can  put  the  question  adequately?  As  a  matter  of 
fact,  there  are  as  many  as  you  please.  Let  me  quote 
a  writer,  Mr.  Goorko,  not  at  all  a  radical  —  not  even  a 
liberal,  as  liberalism  is  understood  in  Russia.  The 
following  lines  may  serve  as  a  summary  of  what  has 
been  said  in  the  preceding : 

We  are  facing  three  threatening  conditions :  first,  periodical 
famines  and  chronic  underfeeding  of  the  whole  peasant  popula- 
tion in  the  central  and  eastern  parts  of  the  agricultural  region; 


THE  URGENCY  OF  REFORM  ,475 

secondly,  manufacturing  industries  which  are  threatened  with 
ruin  for  lack  of  a  market  for  their  products ;  thirdly,  an  annually 
increasing  deficit  in  covering  the  international  balance,  to  the 
amount  of  the  payments  due  for  our  securities  placed  abroad  — 
pa>Tnents  which  can  be  covered  only  by  new  foreign  loans. 

The  first  symptom  can  be  cured  only  by  increasing  the  local 
earnings  of  the  population,  which  again  can  be  accomplished  only 
by  raising  the  productiveness  of  agriculture.  The  second  possi- 
bility can  be  averted  only  by  increasing  the  paying  power  of  the 
population,  which  again  can  be  achieved  only  by  increasing  the 
profitableness  of  the  rural  economy.  The  third  problem  can  be 
solved  only  by  increasing  the  value  of  our  exports,  which  again 
is  possible  only  by  raising  the  productiveness  of  our  estates. 

This  is  entirely  true,  and  we  perfectly  agree  with 
the  ceterum  censco  of  Mr.  Goorko;  namely,  his  central 
idea  that  the  methods  of  Russian  agriculture  must  be 
improved,  and  that  without  such  improvement  no  last- 
ing betterment  in  the  condition  of  Russian  finances  and 
commerce  is  to  be  expected.  The  author,  like  so  many 
others  with  him,  is  not  deficient  in  schemes  for  hun- 
dreds of  measures  likely  to  improve  the  technic  of  the 
tillage  of  land,  the  transportation  of  products,  the  sale 
of  grain  without  the  middleman,  the  technical  knowl- 
edge of  agronomy,  and  so  on.  And  yet  there  is  some- 
thing essentially  wrong  about  their  reasoning.  For  the 
technical  improvements  to  be  applied,  there  must  be  a 
man  who  would  and  could  apply  them.  For  agriculture 
to  be  ameliorated,  there  must  be  an  agriculturist  to 
enjoy  his  work  of  amelioration  and  to  secure  the  profits 
of  it  for  himself.  For  agricultural  knowledge  to  be 
widely  disseminated  in  the  Russian  village,  the  condi- 
tions for  spreading  any  knowledge  must  first  be 
created.  And  thus  from  the  sphere  of  mere  technical 
theorizings  we  are  at  once  transferred  into  the  only 


476  RUSSIA  AND  ITS  CRISIS 

sphere  where  practical  solutions  are  sought :  the  sphere 
of  general  politics.  Here  we  meet  with  views  and 
schemes  for  solving  the  difficulties  which  are  entirely 
different  from  those  recommended  by  Mr.  Goorko  and 
his  adherents. 

Mr.  Goorko  advocates  what  we  in  Russia  should 
call  a  conser\'ative  view.  This  view  is  predominant 
with  our  agrarians.  Let  us  now  see  what  is  the  posi- 
tion of  Russian  liberals  and  democrats  on  the  same 
question. 

Happily  enough,  the  answer  of  Russian  liberalism 
is  given,  not  in  the  form  of  a  private  address,  a  news- 
paper article,  or  a  special  study,  but  in  that  of  a  nearly 
unanimous  declaration  by  hundreds  of  local  assemblies 
summoned  in  1902  by  the  government  itself  to  express 
their  opinion  on  the  burning  question  of  the  agricul- 
tural crisis.  This  was  the  inspiration  of  Mr.  Witte, 
whose  initiative  was  then  intercepted  and  appropriated 
by  Mr.  Plehve,  the  late  minister  of  the  interior.  Mr. 
Plehve  substituted  himself  for  Mr.  Witte  as  president 
of  the  central  commission  w^iich  was  to  summarize  the 
discussions  of  the  local  assemblies,  and  he  did  every- 
thing possible  to  curtail  the  activity  of  these  assemblies, 
to  threaten  them,  and  thus  to  spoil  their  work.  Never- 
theless, the  work  was  done.  It  is  represented  in  a 
stately  collection  of  fifty-eight  volumes  published  by 
the  ministry  of  finance.  The  assemblies  that  were 
authorized  to  deliberate  were  not  the  district  Zemstvos ; 
but  they  had  very  much  in  common  with  them.  The 
presidents  of  the  Zemstvo  assemblies  (the  marshals  of 
nobility  who  preside  at  the  Zemstvo  meetings  ex  officio, 
not  by  election)  were  entitled  to  compose  these  assem- 


THE  URGENCY  OF  REFORM  477 

blies  to  their  own  liking ;  and  many  of  them  used  their 
right  to  summon,  not  only  all  the  representatives  of 
their  local  Zemstvos,  but  also,  in  many  cases,  such  ele- 
ments as  are  not  represented  adequately  in  the  Zemstvo 
assemblies;  /.  c,  the  peasants  and  the  "intellectuals." 
There  were  about  eleven  thousand  members  who  thus 
deliberated  in  more  than  four  hundred  districts  of 
Russia.  Thus  composed,  the  "district  committees" 
answered  the  question  concerning  the  needs  of  agri- 
culture in  a  way  which  may  be  characterized  by  the 
motto  which  one  member  quoted  from  Montesquieu : 
"  Les  pays  ne  sont  pas  cultives  en  raison  de  leur  fer- 
tilite,  mais  en  raison  de  leur  liberte."  They  found  that, 
"  in  order  to  be  economically  active  and  enterprising, 
the  rural  population  must  secure  for  itself  certain 
rights,  which  would  guarantee  its  work  against  en- 
croachments, and  it  must  also  know  that  it  is  entitled 
to  defend  its  rights."  Instead  of  that,  the  peasant  is 
now  powerless  against  the  whims  of  the  local  authori- 
ties; his  economic  activity  is  under  strict  control;  his 
person,  his  property,  and  his  family  are  dependent 
upon  the  arbitrary  decisions  of  the  Mir  (the  com- 
munity) ;  he  may  at  any  time  be  arrested  and  flogged ; 
although,  since  then,  the  manifesto  of  1904  has  abol- 
ished flogging  in  Russia. 

Life  in  the  village  will  find  its  normal  course  only  when  the 
personality  of  the  peasant  shall  have  been  lifted  up;  when  all 
distinction  shall  have  been  abolished  between  the  village  inhabi- 
tants who  are  subject  and  those  who  are  not  subject  to  the  pay- 
ment of  taxes ;  when  the  equality  of  all  the  social  orders,  so  far 
as  their  personal  rights  are  concerned  (which  is  a  principle  pro- 
claimed by  Alexander  II.  in  his  reforms)  shall  have  been  carried 
into  real  life. 


478  RUSSIA  AND  ITS  CRISIS 

Concerning  the  technical  education  suggested  by 
the  government,  the  district  committees  answered  that 
it  was  to  be  preceded  and  made  possible  by  a  wide 
diffusion  of  general  education,  which  was  hampered  by 
the  government  control  of  the  Zemstvo  schools  and  of 
the  people's  reading.^  "^  They  added  that  overtaxation 
and  over-protection  must  first  be  reformed  before  any 
agricultural  improvements  would  become  possible.  As 
a  general  result,  they  rejected  the  government's  pro- 
gram of  "  technical  reforms  "  as  insufficient,  and  asked 
for  a  share  in  the  legislation  in  matters  concerning  the 
villages.  Two  of  the  members,  who  had  formulated 
this  last  demand  in  the  most  explicit  w^ay  —  i.  c,  as  a 
demand  for  central  political  representation  —  were 
immediately  sent  into  exile  by  Mr.  Plehve,  and  some 
others  w^re  removed  from  their  (elective)  offices.  But 
the  general  state  of  mind  was  now  quite  clear:  the 
members  of  the  committees  were  ready  to  help  the 
government,  but  only  upon  certain  conditions,  and  did 
not  wish  to  pledge  their  influence  in  favor  of  such 
minute  reforms  as  the  government  wished  to  suggest. 
The  formal  conflict  between  the  government  and  the 
country  had  begun. 

It  was,  how^ever,  merely  a  beginning,  and  the  con- 
sensus of  opinion  was  not  then  nearly  as  strong  and  as 
uniform  as  it  has  since  become.  The  views  expressed 
by  the  committees  were  pretty  discordant,  and  side  by 
side  with  liberal  statements,  as  formulated  above,  many 
voices  from  the  agrarians  in  the  committees  were  alsd' 
heard;  a  still  larger  number  of  members  were  uncer- 
tain and  wavering.    But  the  example  set  by  the  more 

^"*See  pp.  212.  213,  and  199-203. 


THE  URGENCY  OF  REFOR]\I  479 

determined  proved  decisive.  Many  a  member  who 
until  then  had  been  clinging  to  antiquated  views  and 
old  panaceas  here  learned  to  know  better;  many  a 
trimmer  was  by  the  predominant  current  driven  into 
a  more  resolute  line  of  action ;  many  a  young  man 
received  his  first  lessons  in  political  education  in  the 
sittings  of  the  committees,  or  here  first  tried  his  hand 
at  public  work.  Thus  the  enthusiasm  for  the  coming 
reform  has  grown  enormously  owing  to  the  activity  of 
the  committees,  and  the  interest  in  public  affairs  has 
been  widely  spread  all  over  the  country.  Yet  the 
result  of  this  whole  preparatory  work  might  haA-e  been 
lost,  had  it  not  been  powerfully  instigated  and  sup- 
ported by  the  general  state  of  political  disaffection, 
which  soon  found  expression  in  the  increased  activity 
of  the  revolutionary  parties.  Let  us  now  study  this 
part  of  our  subject. 

We  have  already  seen  that  the  revolutionarv  move- 
ment of  twenty  years  ago  left  two  leading  ideas  as  an 
inheritance  to  its  successors.  The  one  was  that  the  aim 
—  I  mean  the  next  aim  —  of  the  movement  should  be  a 
direct  political  struggle  with  the  autocracy.  The  other 
was  that  this  struggle  had  to  be  conducted  in  the  first 
instance  by  workingmen,  the  proletariat  par  excellence. 
However  different  the  shades  of  socialistic  opinion  may 
have  been,  these  two  points  were  beyond  dispute.  Now, 
we  have  seen  how  the  events  subsequent  to  the  struggle 
of  1879-81  only  tended  to  fortify  the  opinion  that 
autocracy  was  the  first  obstacle  to  be  overcome  before 
any  serious  reform  could  be  inaugurated.  The  same 
trend  of  events  actually  brought  the  Russian  working- 
men   to  the   front.     The  artificial   growth   of  manu- 


48o  RUSSIA  AND  ITS  CRISIS 

factures  and  their  rapid  collapse  were  just  the  condi- 
tions needed  for  the  launching  of  a  labor  party.  Of 
course,  some  workingnien  have  even  before  that  time, 
from  the  very  beginning,  shared  in  the  revolutionary 
movement ;  but,  to  a  certain  degree,  when  they  became 
revolutionaries  they  ceased  being  true  representatives 
of  their  own  class.  The  socialist  propaganda  made 
them  ''  intellectuals."  The  necessary  conclusion  drawn 
by  the  socialists  from  this  circumstance  was  that  it  was 
not  a  "  propaganda  "  among  the  best  and  most  devel- 
oped, but  rather  an  "  agitation "  among  the  masses, 
that  was  wanted.  And  events  soon  came  to  the  sup- 
port of  this  practical  conclusion. 

In  June,  1896,  St.  Petersburg  was  roused  by  a 
startling  movement  of  workingmen,  the  like  of  which 
it  had  never  before  seen.  The  workers  in  twenty-two 
cotton  factories  of  the  northern  capital,  numbering 
more  than  thirty  thousand,  organized  something  like  a 
general  strike.  There  were  no  visible  signs  of  any 
preparatory  propaganda  by  the  socialists,  and  no 
"  intellectual "  leaders  made  themselves  prominent. 
All  the  proclamations  and  other  papers  published  dur- 
ing the  strike  were  written  by  the  men  themselves,  in  a 
plain,  half-educated  language.  To  be  sure,  small  cir- 
cles of  workingmen,  reading  socialist  pamphlets  under 
the  direction  of  young  students,  had  always  existed. 
But  these  were  few,  and  could  by  no  means  account  for 
the  large  spread  of  the  strike.  The  socialists  them- 
selves vowed  that  they  were  taken  by  surprise,  and 
they  bitterly  upbraided  themselves  for  not  having  been 
better  prepared  to  take  advantage  of  the  opportunity. 
The  demands   formulated  by  the  strikers  were  of  a 


THE  URGENCY  OF  REFORM  481 

Strictly  professional  —  /.  e.,  economic  —  character:  a 
reduction  of  their  clay's  work  to  twelve  hours  (one  and 
a  half  hours  for  dinner  included) — from  7  a.  m.  to 
7  p.  M. ;  wages  to  be  slightly  increased  and  to  be  paid 
regularly;  the  machines  to  be  cleaned  during  working 
hours ;  etc.  The  demands  were  so  moderate  and  sensi- 
ble that  immediately  after  the  strike  became  known  the 
minister  of  finance  ordered  the  owners  of  the  manu- 
factures to  remedy  the  most  crying  abuses.  The 
methods  employed  by  the  strikers  were  quite  peaceful ; 
no  violence  was  resorted  to,  and  the  chief  means  of 
protest  was  simply  staying  at  home.  The  movement 
was  at  once  so  unlike  a  "revolutionary  outbreak,"  as 
the  Russian  police  was  accustomed  to  represent  it,  and 
so  imposing  that  it  could  not  fail  to  produce  a  deep 
impression  on  both  the  government  and  the  revolution- 
aries. The  former  for  a  few  moments  was  panic- 
stricken;  the  latter  renewed  their  efforts  and  remodeled 
their  theories  in  accordance  with  the  apparent  require- 
ments of  this  newly  re\'ealed  force  of  organized  labor. 
The  socialistic  movement  of  the  nineties  has  often 
been  compared  with  the  movement  of  the  seventies. 
Its  initial  stage  —  the  predilection  for  professional 
strikes  —  particularly  reminds  one  of  the  initial  period 
of  the  former  movement,  the  so-called  "going  to  the 
people."  Indeed,  the  new  movement  might  have  gone 
through  all  the  phases  of  the  previous  one.  It  might 
have  had  its  serene  period  of  na'ive  self-assertion, 
brought  about  by  the  inexperience  of  the  younger  ele- 
ments; then  another  period  might  have  followed  — 
that  of  embitterment  and  of  growing  skill  in  conspir- 
acy, ending  in  a  desperate  fight  of  violence  by  some 


482  RUSSIA  AND  ITS  CRISIS 

few  survivors.  We  have  seen  how  pacific  was  the  start, 
and  we  shall  have  to  witness  a  further  warlike  experi- 
ence. But,  in  spite  of  this  general  similarity,  the  new 
movement  still  has  a  character  all  its  own.  First,  it  is 
a  movement  on  a  much  larger  scale  than  the  former. 
The  Russian  "  masses,"  up  to  that  time  voiceless  and 
silent,  appear  now  for  the  first  time  on  the  political 
stage  and  make  their  first  attempt  to  speak  in  their  own 
name.  Their  vanguard  —  the  workingmen  in  the 
larger  factories  —  have  already  made  a  beginning,  and 
now  the  people  in  the  villages  are  trying  to  imitate  their 
example.  Of  course,  the  latter  hardly  know  how  to 
spell  their  claims  and  have  scarcely  begun  to  organize. 
But  their  misery  is  great,  and  there  is  always  an 
abundance  of  inflammable  material  in  their  midst. 
Thus  the  new  revolutionary  movement  has  gained 
enormously  in  strength  and  is  infinitely  more  danger- 
ous to  the  government  than  it  has  ever  been  before. 

We  shall  later  return  to  the  question  as  to  how  far 
the  present  revolutionary  movement  is  supported  by 
the  general  disaffection  of  the  masses,  but  for  the 
present  we  must  draw  attention  to  another  feature 
which  gives  to  the  movement  its  complicated  character. 
This  feature  is  the  role  which  the  surviving  representa- 
tives of  the  former  movement  have  played  in  the  pres- 
ent one,  while  impressing  their  own  intellectual  stamp 
upon  the  new  generation  of  revolutionary  beginners. 
The  democratic  socialists  of  the  "  Group  of  the  Emanci- 
pation of  Labor,"  who  had  been  the  last  to  appear  in 
the  former  movement/^  were  the  first  to  start  a  new 
one.     They  were  the  "orthodox  Marxists,"  proud  of 

"  See  p.  425. 


THE  URGENCY  OF  REFORM  483 

having  hoisted  the  banner  of  "  pure  socialism  "  repu- 
diated by  the  former  generation  of  "popuHsts."  Their 
program  —  that  of  a  poHtical  struggle  for  the  "dicta- 
torship of  the  proletaries"  —  seemed  to  be  the  logical 
consequence  of  the  complete  failure  of  their  opponents' 
scheme  for  a  "  social  revolution  by  the  peasants."  The 
fact  was  that  the  struggle  of  the  workingmen  against 
autocracy  was  of  itself  coming  to  the  front;  and  such 
a  struggle  offered  the  best  chance  of  success  to  a  theory 
which  had  always  taught  that  this  was  the  only  kind 
of  struggle  which  led  directly  to  the  advent  of  social- 
ism, in  strict  accordance  with  the  teachings  of  "  scien- 
tific socialism." 

The  young  generation  grown  up  in  Russia  in  the 
eighties  had,  however,  its  own  views,  and  —  what  is 
more  —  its  own  temper,  which  made  it  impossible  for 
it  at  once  to  adopt  the  whole  program  of  the  refugees 
of  1880.  This  new  generation  grew  up  in  the  period 
of  political  reaction,  and  it  was  quite  lacking  in  that 
political  training  which  generally  is  gained  only  in 
periods  of  political  struggle.  There  were  no  bracing 
elements,  no  strengthening  influences,  in  its  personal 
experience.  Any  faith  in  social  action  was  lost  by  the 
men  of  that  generation ;  instead,  they  lived  at  a  period 
when  schemes  for  individual  self-improvement  were 
most  popular,  and  when  Tolstoy's  ethical  anarchism 
was  making  numerous  converts.  Thus,  when  that  dull 
decade  of  1 881 -91  had  come  to  its  close,  and  a  new 
political  movement  set  in,  the  reformers  of  the  eighties 
hailed  it  in  a  most  remarkable  spirit.  They  were  quite 
delighted  to  find  ready  at  hand  a  theory  which  relieved 
them  of  the  burden  of  carrying  out  the  reform  by  their 


484  RUSSIA  AND  ITS  CRISIS 

own  efforts,  the  general  trend  of  events  being  made 
responsible  for  the  final  success  of  that  reform.  Social 
revolution  was  now  safely  expected  to  come  as  an 
unavoidable  result  of  an  organic  and  spontaneous 
material  evolution ;  and  people  in  possession  of  that 
"scientific"  prognosis  looked  down  with  contempt 
upon  their  predecessors,  who  were  shortsighted  enough 
to  rely  upon  a  weak  individual  effort.  "  The  material- 
istic explanation  of  history"  satisfied  their  taste  for 
facts,  for  positive  data,  and  justified  their  disbelief  in 
the  "role  of  personality,"  in  "ideology,"  and  in  every 
sort  of  "Utopian"  conception.  Thus  the  "historical 
materialism  "  of  Marx  became  a  revelation  and  a  sanc- 
tion for  such  of  them  as  now  emerged  from  the  passiv- 
ity of  the  eighties  to  the  more  active  disposition  of 
mind  of  the  first  half  of  the  nineties. 

The  development  of  Russian  capitalism  at  this  very 
time  seemed  entirely  to  harmonize  with  the  theoretic 
explanations  of  Marx,  and  it  warranted  the  final  suc- 
cess of  socialism.  The  strikes  of  1896  and  1897  defi- 
nitely persuaded  the  young  generation  of  revolutionists 
that  the  evolution  of  socialism  would  take  place  all  by 
itself,  and  that  the  facts  must  give  direction  to  the 
theory  of  the  revolutionary  propaganda. 

The  consequence  was  that,  in  spite  of  the  influence 
of  the  elder  Marxists,  the  active  and  individual  —  the 
political  —  element  in  the  revolution  was  disregarded, 
and  the  chief  attention  was  drawn  to  the  passive  and 
spontaneous  —  the  economic  —  side  of  the  movement. 
Strikes  of  workingmen  —  their  struggle  for  better 
wages  —  were  to  become  the  main,  if  not  the  only, 
object  of  the  socialistic  propaganda  and  agitation.    The 


THE  URGENXY  OF  REFORM  485 

young  reformers  took  particular  pains  to  emphasize  the 
peaceful  character  of  the  new  movement,  as  the  best 
proof  of  its  spontaneity  and  omen  of  its  iinal  success. 
Even  the  advent  of  capitalism  —  so  much  feared  by  the 
"populists"  of  the  former  generation  —  was  now 
hailed  as  the  longed-for  symptom  of  an  approaching 
social  catastrophe.  The  precapitalistic  forms  of  Rus- 
sia's economic  history,  such  as  the  village  community 
and  the  home  industries,  so  much  idealized  in  the 
schemes  of  the  populists,  were  now  relentlessly  criti- 
cised and  repudiated  as  an  obstacle  to  the  socialization 
of  the  means  of  production.  The  Russian  peasant,  who 
in  the  former  scheme  was  to  accomplish  the  social 
revolution,  was  now  proclaimed  a  petty  bourgeois  in 
embryo;  and  the  workingman  was  to  be  the  hero  of 
the  coming  cataclysm.  Every  interest  in  the  village 
was  lost,  and  the  factories  and  workshops  became  the 
exclusive  field  of  activity  for  the  young  revolutionists 
of  the  new  generation.  For  some  five  or  six  years  the 
revolutionary  youth  reveled  in  their  discovery  of  the 
close  harmony  existing  between  the  theory  of  Marx 
and  the  corresponding  facts  of  actual  life  in  Russia. 
But  this  stage  of  the  movement  did  not  last  long,  and 
the  old  Marxists  were  the  first  to  dispel  the  charm. 
They  sharply  censured  the  youths  for  not  being  right, 
or  "  orthodox,"  Marxists ;  they  proclaimed  themselves 
opposed  to  what  they  termed  the  one-sided  "econo- 
mism  "  of  the  new  movement;  they  argued  that  the 
movement  thus  directed  was  drifting  toward  "  trade- 
unionism  "  and  away  from  socialism.  Not  strikes  on 
professional  lines  with  demands  for  a  shorter  workday 
and  better  wages,  but  direct  political  demands  for  the 


486  RUSSIA  AND  ITS  CRISIS 

destruction  of  autocracy;  not  local  work,  but  party 
work  on  a  large  scale  —  such  was  now  the  watchword 
of  socialistic  democratism.  A  new  literary  organ  of 
the  "orthodox"  Marxists  was  founded  (The  Spark), 
and  it  carried  the  day  against  the  inexperienced 
"  economism  "  of  the  younger  generation. 

It  is  necessary  to  add  that  the  actual  conditions  of 
life  had  contributed  much  to  this  first  victory  of  a  more 
pronounced  revolutionism.  According  to  Russian  law, 
no  strike  on  purely  professional  lines  is  possible.  The 
very  fact  of  a  strike  —  independently  of  its  causes,  its 
character,  or  its  demands  —  constitutes  a  crime;  and 
the  authorities  are  obliged  immediately  to  intervene  — 
not  in  order  to  satisfy  the  manufacturers  or  the  work- 
ingmen,  but  to  re-establish  "  public  tranquillity."  They 
generally  choose  the  shortest  road  to  this  goal,  which  is 
to  support  the  stronger  side  —  not  always  that  of  the 
manufacturers.  Thus  neither  side  is  satisfied  with  the 
too  vigorous  intervention  of  the  authorities,  always 
violent  and  too  often  untimely  for  one  or  the  other 
contesting  party.  This  one  result  is  certainly  attained : 
the  strike  from  a  professional  contest  becomes  at  once 
a  political  demonstration  —  before  even  the  workmen 
themselves  have  had  time  to  realize  it.  Thus  they 
generally  begin  with  a  protest  against  the  manu- 
facturer, but  invariably  finish  by  protesting  against 
autocracy;  and  very  often  the  manufacturer  himself, 
in  his  inmost  heart,  feels  inclined  to  join  them. 

There  is  one  other  point  in  which  orthodox  Marx- 
ism found  itself  at  variance  with  the  generation  of  the 
nineties  —  and  where  it  likewise  came  out  victorious. 
It  was  at  that  very  time  that  the  German  movement 


THE  URGENCY  OF  REFORM  487 

for  a  "revision  "  of  the  Marxist  theory  became  known 
in  Russia.  The  "  revisionist "  movement  proved  very 
tempting  to  some  deeper  thinkers,  and  a  stage  of 
"criticism"  of  the  Marx  theory  set  in.  Now^  the 
positon  of  "revisionism"  and  of  Bernstein's  theories 
was  indeed  quite  different  in  Russia  from  what  it  was 
in  Germany.  There,  as  we  ah-eady  have  seen,  the 
Social  Democracy  celebrated  parliamentary  victories 
and  formed  a  great  political  party.  "  Revisionism," 
therefore,  psychologically  corresponded  to  a  certain 
tendency  —  so  often  denounced  by  the  left  wing  of  the 
party,  and  yet  existing  and  increasing  —  to  adapt  the 
revolutionary  doctrine  of  J\Iarx  to  the  conditions  of  a 
peaceful  parliamentary  struggle. 

In  Russia,  on  the  other  hand,  there  existed  no 
such  reasons  for  moderation.  The  party  was  just 
then  in  the  process  of  formation;  its  political  role 
was  necessarily  revolutionary,  not  reformistic,  and 
everything  that  might  tend  to  make  it  drift  from 
revolution  toward  reform  w^as  quite  unacceptable:  it 
interfered  with  the  socialism  of  the  party  and  threat- 
ened to  keep  a  door  open  for  the  most  heterogeneous 
elements.  It  was  then  quite  natural  that,  for  the  sake 
of  self-preservation,  the  party  had  to  steer  clear  of 
"revisionism,"  whatever  might  be  its  theoretical  value. 
The  clash  between  revisionism  and  orthodoxy  has 
become  still  more  acute  owing  to  the  fact  that  revision- 
ist tendencies  have  found  their  way  into  legal  literature, 
and  thus  have  enjoyed  large  circulation,  while  ortho- 
doxism  has  had  to  defend  its  position  by  means  of 
the  underground  press.  Again,  the  chief  literary 
leaders  of  legal  Marxism  —  who  turned  to  be  "  revi- 


488  RUSSIA  AND  ITS  CRISIS 

sionists"  —  made  themselves  suspected  of  liberalism; 
and,  indeed,  some  of  them  soon  changed  their  party 
for  another  and  a  more  moderate  one.  All  this  pre- 
vented the  large  spread  of  "  revisionism "  and  made 
the  Russian  Social  Democracy  uncompromising  and 
"  orthodox."  That  is  why  the  Russian  representatives, 
together  with  those  of  some  smaller  countries  recently 
converted  to  socialism,  unswervingly  give  their  sup- 
port to  Marxist  "orthodoxy"  at  the  international  con- 
gresses of  the  Social  Democratic  party. 

Thus  far,  the  activity  of  the  leaders,  while  directed 
toward  the  elimination  of  the  "opportunist"  currents 
of  "economism"  and  "revisionism,"  was  progressing 
very  satisfactorily.  This  success  is  easily  explained  by 
the  fact  that  their  tendency  coincided  with  the  ascend- 
ing line  of  the  whole  movement  and  was  powerfully 
supported  by  the  whole  trend  of  the  increasing  revolu- 
tionism of  the  Russian  socialists.  Less  successful, 
however,  was  the  attempt  of  the  leading  group  to 
assure  its  victory  and  to  perpetuate  its  teachings  by 
means  of  an  entire  reconstruction  of  the  party  organiza- 
tion on  the  principle  of  strict  centralization.  The 
antiquated  tradition  of  "  federalism,"  to  be  sure,  had 
received  a  serious  blow  from  the  Social  Democratic 
doctrine,  which  postulated  international  unity  of  the 
"  proletaries  of  all  countries,"  in  their  struggle  against 
the  international  bourgeoisie.  Eut,  on  the  other  hand, 
"  federalism  "  has  been  powerfully  enforced  by  the  fact 
of  there  being  in  existence  some  strong  Social  Demo- 
cratic groups,  composed  chiefly  or  entirely  of  Poles, 
Jews,  Armenians,  and  other  national  elements,  com- 
bining their  struggle  for  national  independence  with 


THE  URGENCY  OF  REFORM  489 

the  social  struggle.  An  attempt  at  unification  of  the 
whole  Social  Democracy  of  Russia  was,  however,  suc- 
cessfully carried  through  at  the  second  congress  of  the 
Social  Democratic  party  (1903),  under  the  strong  pro- 
test of  a  dissenting  minority,  accused  of  "  separatism  " 
and  of  ■'  federalist "  tendencies.  A  series  of  independ- 
ent organizations  did  not  wish  to  submit  to  the  strict 
control  planned  by  the  leading  group,  since  it  would 
mean  their  dissolution  and  their  descent  to  the  sub- 
ordinate position  of  local  committees;  and  so  they 
seceded  from  the  reorganized  Social  Democratic  party. 
The  independent  association  of  the  Jewish  Bund  took 
the  lead  in  this  secession. 

But,  besides  those  separate  "nationalistic"  organi- 
zations, there  was  a  large  branch  of  socialists  that  from 
the  very  beginning  preferred  to  go  its  own  way,  and 
which  never  shared  the  doctrines  of  "pure  Marxism," 
whether  "revised"  or  "orthodox."  This  was  the  old 
"  People's  Will  "  party,  whose  surviving  members  soon 
made  their  voices  heard.  Their  resurrection  came  quite 
unexpectedly,  since  they  were  supposed  to  have  been 
"wiped  out"  by  the  heavy  artillery  of  triumphant 
"Marxism."  But,  as  the  legal  (the  "economist") 
Marxism  was  soon  on  the  wane,  they  began  to  dispute 
with  "orthodox"  Marxism  the  honor  of  reviving  the 
political  career  of  Social  Democracy.  Soon  they  found 
such  gaps  in  the  program  and  the  political  activity  of 
the  predominant  party  as  to  give  them  an  opportunity 
to  pursue  their  own  revolutionary  work  without  com- 
petition, and  even  to  become  most  dangerous  com- 
petitors of  the  Social  Democrats  themselves.  The 
explanation    again    is    that    they    adopted    the    same 


490  RUSSIA  AND  ITS  CRISIS 

policy  toward  the  Social  Democrats  as  the  latter 
had  adopted  toward  the  "economists"  and  the 
"  revisionists ;  "  namely,  they  represented  increasing 
revolutionism,  while  the  Social  Democrats  played  the 
conservatives. 

Indeed,  the  "orthodox"  current,  in  spite  of  its 
repudiation  of  revisionism  and  economism,  was  in  its 
turn  handicapped  and  fettered  by  the  traditional 
scheme  of  Marx ;  namely,  by  the  theory  of  the  "  class 
struggle."  In  strict  harmony  with  this  theory,  their 
activity  was  to  be  confined  to  organizing  the  masses  for 
the  coming  social  revolution ;  and  the  *'  masses  "  they 
were  to  organize  were  confined  to  the  comparatively 
small  circle  of  Russian  "proletaries;"  /.  c,  producers 
who  owned  none  of  the  means  of  production.  Mean- 
time, the  survivors  of  the  "  People's  Will "  party 
proved  more  adaptable  to  the  local  conditions  of  time 
and  place.  They  were' ready  to  enter  upon  immediate 
revolutionary  activity  in  whatever  form  it  should  pre- 
sent itself  at  the  moment;  and  they  enlisted  their 
followers  wherever  they  found  them  —  workingmen  or 
petty  farmers,  "proletaries"  or  "intellectuals." 

Yielding  to  the  pressure  of  the  general  trend  of 
opinion,  the  Social  Democrats  went  one  step  farther, 
in  that,  besides  strikes  and  peaceful  demonstrations, 
they  admitted  armed  demonstrations  as  a  possible  form 
of  their  active  struggle  against  the  government.  The 
Social  Revolutionaries  (such  is  the  official  name  of  the 
revived  "  People's  Will  "  party)  felt  free  to  go  farther, 
and  to  resuscitate  the  most  formidable  —  the  terroristic 
—  method  of  revolutionary  activity.  They  organized 
the  "fighting  branch"  of  the  party,  which  soon  be- 


THE  URGENCY  OF  REFORM  491 

came  particularly  known  through  a  series  of  pohtical 
murders,  such  as  the  assassination  of  the  ministers 
Bogolyapov,  Sippyagin,  Plehve,  and  others. 

This  was,  however,  not  only,  nor  even  the  chief, 
distinction  between  the  old  and  the  new  socialism  in 
Russia.  As  a  matter  of  fact,  terrorism  was  the  most 
important  feature  so  far  as  revolutionary  practice  was 
concerned;  but  the  successors  of  the  "People's  Will" 
party  were  never  satisfied  with  mere  practice  without 
a  corresponding  theory.  They  always  considered  sys- 
tematic terrorism  as  a  sort  of  transient  and  temporary 
expedient  necessitated  by  the  dire  conditions  of  the 
present  struggle;  but  so  far  were  they  from  believing 
that  individual  action  could  essentially  change  the  pres- 
ent state  of  things,  that  they  even  went  farther  in  the 
opposite  direction  than  did  the  Social  Democrats.  They 
still  stuck  to  their  former  idea  that  the  zdiolc  people, 
and  not  workingmen  and  proletaries  alone,  had  to 
bring  about  the  socialistic  overthrow-  i.  c,  they 
believed  that  the  real  social  revolution  in  Russia  must 
be  made  by  the  peasants.  Contrary  to  the  new  Marxist 
current,  they  never  forsook  that  belief  in  the  peasantry 
as  "  a  tremendous  force  upon  which  the  realization  of 
the  economic  reconstruction  of  society  depends  in  the 
future." 

But  for  some  time  they  thought  this  future  to  be 
far  off, ^2  and  in  their  new  pr6gram,  published  in  1898, 
they  renounced  any  "systematic  activity  among  the 
peasants,"  on  the  assumption  that  they  were  too  ignor- 
ant and  downtrodden.  Like  their  adversaries,  they 
preferred  to  operate  in  the  more  intelligent  stratum  of 

"  See  p.  417. 


492  RUSSIA  AND  ITS  CRISIS 

the  workingmen  of  the  cities.  But  they  did  not  ideal- 
ize the  workingmen  as  the  only  chosen  people  of  the 
socialistic  state,  and  relied  upon  their  more  developed 
vanguard  only  for  the  same  reason  that  they  relied 
upon  the  "intellectuals;"  both  were  to  work  for  the 
time  when  the  peasants  would  be  able  to  advocate  for 
themselves  the  cause  of  the  social  revolution.  Some 
two  years  later,  the  agrarian  riots  in  southern  Russia 
and  the  unexpected  facility  of  the  propaganda  among 
the  peasants  made  the  Social  Revolutionaries  recon- 
sider their  decision  as  to  the  part  to  be  played  by  the 
peasants  in  the  general  movement.  They  organized  a 
particular  branch  of  the  party  —  the  so-called  "Agra- 
rian League"  —  which  was  to  begin  direct  work  in  the 
villages.  Here  again,  as  well  as  in  their  terroristic 
activity,  they  met  with  no  competition  from  the  Social 
Democrats. 

But  the  determined  position  of  the  Social  Revolu- 
tionaries in  the  villages  obliged  the  Social  Democrats 
likewise  to  formulate  an  agrarian  program.  It  is  well 
known  that  the  agrarian  question  forms  the  weakest 
point  in  the  genuine  theory  of  Marx;  and  such  it 
remained  in  the  Russian  reproduction  of  the  theory. 
But  the  candid  followers  of  Marx  in  Russia  were  not 
satisfied  with  a  mere  reproduction  of  the  German 
lacuna;  and  they  tried  conscientiously  to  fill  up  the 
gap.  Their  theory  is  that,  since  the  Russian  peasantry 
still  lingers  in  the  precapitalistic  age,  it  must  first  be 
brought  to  capitalism.  To  this  end  communal  prop- 
erty must  be  supplanted  by  private  property,  and  then 
the  natural  process  of  "  proletarization "  (^.  e.,  the 
separation  of  the  producers  from  their  means  of  pro- 


THE  URGENCY  OF  REFORM  493 

duction  —  the  land)  would  be  carried  out.  In  that 
theory,  as  we  have  seen,  the  part  of  Russian  socialism 
was  to  help  the  Russian  peasants  to  become  bourgeois 
and  to  dispossess  their  weaker  members.  This  posi- 
tion was  queer  enough  —  to  work  for  capitalism  in 
order  to  bring  about  socialism  in  the  Russian  village. 
The  Social  Democrats,  however,  made  the  position  still 
more  awkward  by  proposing,  instead  of  the  general 
socialistic  scheme  —  the  nationalization  of  land  —  a 
specific  Russian  scheme  for  giving  back  to  the  peasants 
only  such  plots  of  land  as  had  been  withheld  from  them 
by  their  landowners  forty  years  ago,  at  the  time  of 
their  emancipation. 

Out  of  the  two  agrarian  programs,  that  of  the 
Social  Revolutionaries  is,  of  course,  more  acceptable  to 
the  Russian  peasant,  since  it  tries  to  engraft  new 
demands  on  his  own  ancient  craving  for  land.  The 
attempt  of  the  Social  Democrats  to  organize  the  "  pro- 
letaries "  of  the  village  separately,  and  to  oppose  them 
to  the  owners  of  petty  landholdings  (as  bourgeois),  is 
certainly  possible  only  on  paper.  But,  at  the  same  time, 
the  Social  Revolutionaries  are  supporting  only  a  social 
Utopia,  while  the  Social  Democrats  are  swimming  with 
the  current  of  actual  life;  the  former,  by  trying  to 
preserve  and  to  impregnate  with  the  socialistic  spirit 
the  landed  commune ;  and  the  latter,  by  acknowledging 
the  predorninant  tendency  toward  the  destruction  of  the 
commune  and  the  coming  ascendancy  of  private  prop- 
erty in  the  village. 

Thus  a  desperate  struggle  and  a  very  acute  com- 
petition exist  between  the  two  currents  of  socialism  in 
Russia.    The  Social  Democrats  are  aggressive,  if  only 


494  RUSSIA  AND  ITS  CRISIS 

because  they  pretend  to  possess  a  universal  and  inter- 
national—  a    cosmopolitan  —  doctrine.       The     Social 
Revolutionaries  are  holding  their  own  —  and  are  even 
growing  in  influence  and  in  number,  since  they  much 
more  fully  represent  the  local  aspect  of  the  movement, 
such  as  is  determined  by  particular  conditions  of  time 
and  place.     To  an  outside  observer  it  is  perhaps  much 
clearer  than  to  the  participants  in  the  struggle,  that  the 
two  currents,  so  far  from  being  mutually  exclusive, 
rather  complement  each  other.     Of  course,  the  more 
profitable  part  —  that  of  representing  the  theoretical, 
the  ideal,  side  of  socialism  —  falls  to  the  cosmopolitan 
doctrine,  while  the  local  current  has  to  bear  all  the  sins 
of  an  inadequate  realization  of  the  former  in  the  actual 
conditions  of  life  in  Russia.    While  the  Social  Democ- 
racy is  most  anxious  to  preserve  *'  the  clearness  of  party 
lines  "  and  the  "  purity  of  doctrine,"  and  thus  prepare 
itself  for  the  work  of  the  future,  the  Social  Revolu- 
tionaries adapt  themselves  as  well  as  they  can  to  the 
dirty  work  of  the  present.    That  is  why  all  the  revolu- 
tionary blows  wdiich  have  essentially  determined  the 
change  in  the  political  situation  during  the  last  three 
or   four  years  have  been   struck   by   Social   Revolu- 
tionaries. 

But  the  Social  Democrats  meantime  violently 
charged  their  rivals  with  acting  contrary  to  the  best- 
established  maxims  of  scientific  socialism,  and  thus 
making  common  cause  with  the  bourgeois.  They 
themselves  confidently  made  their  preparations  for  the 
time  when  a  ''class  struggle"  by  the  "proletariat" 
should  become  possible.  By  the  very  trend  of  events, 
however,   they   were  thrown   from   their  preparatory 


THE  URGENCY  OF  REFORM  495 

work  for  the  "organization"  of  a  labor  party  into  an 
active,  and  a  revolutionary,  struggle.  Their  strikes, 
at  first  purely  economic,  soon  became  political,  and 
their  mass  demonstrations  from  peaceful  became 
armed.  The  psychology  ai  the  revolutionary  move- 
ment has  decidedly  outgrown  the  stage  marked  by 
"orthodox  Marxism  ;  ".and  though  the  "  Social  Demo- 
crats try  to  keep  clear  from  any  suspicion  of  making 
common  cause  with  "  nationalistic  "  and  "  revolution- 
ary" socialists,  they  practically  work  toward  the  same 
end  of  a  political,  and  not  a  social,  revolution.  The 
whole  movement  is  thus  much  more  united  in  its  prac- 
tical activity  than  in  its  theoretical  foundations.  Thus 
it  is  that,  in  order  to  appreciate  the  real  strength  and 
political  importance  of  the  movement,  we  must  not 
confine  ourselves  to  a  study  of  party  doctrines  and  of 
mutual  party  criticisms. 

These  variances  between  the  two  parties  m-ight  have 
more  importance  if  there  were  any  real  chance  for  an 
application  of  programs  and  schemes  drawn  up  on 
paper.  But,  as  things  now  are,  the  chief  requirement 
of  a  program  is  that  it  correspond  to  the  degree  of  the 
revolutionary  disposition  of  the  public  mind,  and  that 
it  be  plausible  enough  to  make  converts.  That  is  why, 
in  spite  of  the  profusion  of  bitter  words  and  accusa- 
tions exchanged  by  the  leaders  of  both  parties  in  the 
literary  organs  of  their  central  organizations  (the 
palm,  however,  beii7g  carried  off  by  the  Social  Demo- 
crats), we  shall  find  much  less  exclusiveness  and  less 
"clearness  of  party  lines"  if  from  the  centers  we 
descend  to  the  rank  and  file  of  the  revolutionists  in  the 
country.      Social   Democrats   and   Social    Revolution- 


496  RUSSIA  AND  ITS  CRISIS 

aries  very  often  side  with  each  other;  and  their 
negative  work  certainly  is  the  same.  The  chief  ques- 
tion is  hozi>  fuuch  work  is  done ;  and  only  in  finding  an 
answer  to  this  can  we  appreciate  how  widespread  is 
political  disaffection  in  Russia. 

For  the  first  five  years  of  the  movement  (1895- 
1900)  a  report  was  presented  by  the  Social  Democrats 
to  the  international  congress  in  Paris.  This  report 
contains  the  history  of  the  nine  large  local  organiza- 
tions which  united  in  forming  the  Russian  Social 
Democratic  Labor  Party  in  1898  (St.  Petersburg, 
Moscow,  Ivanovo-Vosnessensk,  Keeyev,  Yekatereen- 
oslav,  Harkov,  Odessa,  Nikolayev,  and  some  organiza- 
tions in  the  Urals;  not  to  mention  smaller  ones  in 
eight  minor  local  circles).  The  story  is  always  the 
same :  A  group  of  "  intellectuals,"  mostly  young  men 
from  the  universities  and  other  higher  institutions  of 
learning,  conduct  a  socialistic  "propaganda"  among 
local  workingmen,  and  for  this  purpose  organize 
several  private  circles  for  self-culture.  The  most 
intelligent  among  the  pupils  soon  join  their  teachers  in 
forming  a  local  committee,  which  starts  an  "  agitation  " 
on  a  large  scale  for  an  "  economic "  struggle  in  the 
factories  and  workshops.  As  a  result,  a  more  or  less 
successful  strike  follows.  Then  the  attention  of  the 
authorities  is  drawn  to  the  local  group,  and  after  some 
few^  months  of  existence  the  committee  is  ferreted  out 
by  the  police  and  the  members  are  sent  to  prison.  A 
short  interval  ensues,  after  which  the  committee  is 
re-established.  Then  a  larger  group  of  workingmen  is 
"organized."  The  local  center  becomes  steadier,  and 
its  existence  less  dependent  upon  the  occasional  raids 


THE  URGENCY  OF  REFORM  497 

of  the  police  and  discoveries  of  the  spies.  Thereupon 
its  activity  is  enlarged.  Some  kind  of  manifolding- 
niachine  or  a  printing-press  is  acquired,  and  a  local 
publishing  center  is  established.  It  begins  with  reprints 
of  small  leaflets,  and  it  sometimes  ends  with  a  regular 
periodical.  The  "  literature "  is  spread  among  the 
workingmen,  and  thus  a  larger  circle  of  sympathizers 
is  secured  by  the  central  nucleus.  This  makes  possible 
periodical  political  demonstrations  on  a  still  larger 
scale.  The  first  and  the  most  regular  of  these  demon- 
strations is  the  international  Labor  Day  —  the  first  of 
May.  The  ideal  aim  is  a  general  strike,  on  political 
lines. ^^ 

The  numerical  results  of  these  various  kinds  of 
activity  by  the  Social  Democrats,  for  the  first  five  years, 
1895-1900,  are  as  follows:  The  strikes  numbered 
about  220 ;  the  total  number  of  strikers  was  more  than 
200,000;  out  of  160  cases  of  known  results,  120  were 
successful ;  three-fourths  of  the  strikes  were  in  the  cot- 

"  In  spite  of  its  being  composed  of  both  workingmen  and  "  intel- 
lectuals," a  Social  Democratic  Committee  has  not  yet  lost  its 
prevailingly  "  intellectual  "  stamp.  "  Our  party  has  not  yet  become  a 
class  party  of  proletaries,  in  the  true  sense  of  the  word :  .  .  .  . 
there  exists  only  an  organization  of  Social  Democrats,  and,  at  its 
side,  an  unorganized  mass  of  proletaries,  which  from  time  to  time 
manifests  itself  in  revolutionary  outbursts.  We  feel  a  certain 
isolation  between  the  intellectual  summit  and  the  proletarian  downs  ; 
and,  in  spite  of  all  the  eagerness  of  the  latter  to  melt  into  one  with 
the  former,  they  have  not  yet  succeeded.  The  mass  has  remained 
incredulous  toward  all  the  appeals  of  the  intellectual  Social  Demo- 
crats ....  We  cannot  carry  the  mass  with  us.    Our  generals  remain 

without  an   army Only   on   the   very   last   occasion   the   mass 

began  to  manifest  that  confidence  for  which  our  vanguard  looked 
for  so  long  a  time."  This  quotation  is  taken  from  a  letter  by  a 
workingman  published  in  The  Spark,  January   7,    1905. 


498  RUSSIA  AND  ITS  CRISIS 

ton  and  the  metal  manufactures;  of  periodicals  (pub- 
lished in  six  different  places)  thirty  numbers  were 
issued  ;^^  persons  arrested,  5,942.  As  a  person 
arrested  generally  remains  in  prison  at  least  six  months 
waiting  for  a  trial  —  during  which  time  a  ''preliminary 
inquiry"  is  supposed  to  be  going  on  —  the  aggregate 
time  "  previously  "  passed  in  prison,  for  the  period  in 
question,  amounts  to  seven  hundred  years  of  solitary 
confinement. 

These  figures,  of  course,  do  not  represent  the  results 
of  the  whole  socialistic  movement  over  the  whole  of 
Russia.  They  refer  only  to  the  activity  of  the  groups 
united  in  1898  under  the  general  name  of  the  Social 
Democratic  Labor  party.  If  we  now  turn  to  the  other 
chief  branch  of  Russian  socialism  —  the  Social  Revolu- 
tionaries—  we  can  quote  new  figures,  referring  chiefly 
to  their  editorial  activity.  At  the  end  of  1901  all  local 
groups  of  the  Social  Revolutionaries  united  in  one 
party  organization ;  two  other  large  organizations 
joined  the  party  in  1902;  and  now  it  numbers  more 
than  forty-nine  committees  and  groups  scattered 
throughout  Russia.  Their  literary  organ,  Revolution- 
ary Russia,  was  started  in  December,  1900;  and  the 
number  of  copies  published  has  steadily  increased. 
The  first  issues  were  of  only  1,000  copies;  but  as  more 
and  more  were  needed,  the  number  of  copies  printed 
gradually  increased  to  2,000,  4,000,  5,000,  7,000,  and 
10,000  in  subsequent  issues.  Besides,  some  forty- 
three  leaflets  were  published  (1902),  amounting  to 
317,000  copies   and   more   than    1,000,000  sheets   of 

"  One  must  keep  in  mind  the  difficulties  and  dangers  with  which 
printing  in  underground  printing-offices  is  fraught. 


THE  URGENCY  OF  REFORM  499 

printed  paper.  In  the  following  year  (1903)  there 
were  distributed  2,000.000  sheets  and  395,000  copies. 
And  yet  the  local  committees  always  complain  that  the 
literature  forwarded  is  insufficient,  and  that  the  supply 
lags  far  behind  the  demand.  The  editorial  activity  of 
the  "Agrarian  League"  of  the  party  is  not  included 
in  these  reports.  As  has  been  mentioned  above,  it  is 
chiefly  in  the  villages  that  the  party  has  carried  on  its 
work  during  the  two  past  years  (1903-4). 

Besides  the  two  socialistic  organizations  described, 
there  exist  in  Russia  other  national  organizations  — 
some  of  them  older,  better  organized,  more  widely 
extended,  and  more  influential  in  the  regions  of  their 
activity. 

Two  Polish  socialistic  parties  are  first  to  be  men- 
tioned, the  difference  between  them  reminding  one  of 
that  existing  between  the  two  Russian  parties.  The 
one  is  purely  "Social  Democratic"  and  cosmopolitan; 
the  other,  local  and,  as  a  result  of  local  conditions, 
intensely  nationalistic.  It  professes  to  work  for  the 
political  independence  of  Poland.  The  latter  is  par- 
ticularly active  and  aggressive ;  the  role  of  the  former 
up  to  the  present  time  has  been  mostly  defensive  and 
secondary.  Thus  their  mutual  relation  and  compara- 
tive importance  are  just  the  opposite  of  what  we  have 
seen  in  the  case  of  the  corresponding  Russian  parties. 
Since  the  nationalistic  branch  of  Polish  socialism  has 
been  predominant,  the  results  of  its  activity  are  par- 
ticularly interesting.  These  results  are  published  in 
the  report  on  The  Present  Revolutionary  Movement  in 
Poland,  printed  in  London  in  1904,  in  the  name  of 
the  party  (the  "Polish  Socialist  Party,"  or  P.  P.  S.). 


500 


RUSSIA  AND  ITS  CRISIS 


Below  we  quote  some  figures  from  the  report,  showing 
the  publishing  activity  of  the  party : 


Year 


1895- 

1896. 

1897. 

1898. 
1899. 

1900. 
I90I . 
1902. 

1903. 


Published  in 
Poland 


12,700 
26,900 
25,980 
55.350 
63,475 
31,950 
25,300 
41,640 
103,600 


Smuggled 
in  from  Abroad 


16,767 
21,381 
19,887 
29,402 

36,397 
55-560 
67,750 
47,660 
74,260 


Total  Number 
of  Copies 


29,467 
48,467 
45,212 
«4,752 
99,872 
87,510 
93,050 
89,300 
177,860 


In  spite  of  this  steady  increase  in  the  number  of 
printed  copies,  the  report  admits  that  the  party  "  falls 
short  of  satisfying  the  awakened  demand  for  revolu- 
tionary literature,  although  special  attention  is  directed 
to  this  branch  of  its  activity."  The  report  states  that 
regularly  "  every  one  of  these  pamphlets  goes  from 
hand  to  hand  until  it  is  completely  worn  out  and  illeg- 
ible." The  number  of  victims  of  police  persecution  for 
the  same  period,  1895-1903,  is  given  as  717.  This 
figure  takes  account  of  those  only  who  were  sentenced 
to  hard  labor,  prison,  or  exile;  slighter  punishments 
and  "  previous  detention  "  not  being  included. 

For  Russia  proper  a  far  more  significant  movement 
is  that  among  the  Jews.  The  particularly  hard  condi- 
tions of  existence  created  for  the  Russian  Jews  during 
the  last  twenty-five  years  by  the  restrictions  and  pro- 
hibitions of  the  law  have  prepared  the  soil  for  political 
agitation,  and  at  the  same  time  made  necessary  a 
formation  of  a  separate  party  organization  on  strictly 
national  lines.  Many  socialistic  groups  united  for  that 
purpose  in  September,  1897,  and  formed  "The  General 


THE  URGENCY  OF  REFORM  501 

Jewish  Working-men's  Alliance  for  Russia  and 
Poland"  (better  known  under  its  shorter  title,  the 
''Bund").  The  activity  of  the  ''Bund"  among  the 
workingmen  and  petty  craftsmen  in  western  Russia 
was  particularly  fraught  with  consequences.  For  the 
first  three  years  alone  the  "  Bund  "  was  able  to  present 
the  following  figures  as  a  result  of  its  agitation : 
strikes,  312;  number  of  strikers  in  156  known  cases, 
27,890;  of  the  262  cases  where  the  result  was  known, 
239  (91  per  cent.)  successful  and  23  (9  per  cent.)  lost. 
As  a  result,  the  general  position  of  the  workingmen  in 
that  region  has  been  conspicuously  improved :  wages 
have  been  raised  30  to  100  per  cent.,  and  the  working- 
day  has  been  shortened  by  two  or  three  hours.  Of 
printed  papers  in  Yiddish  (the  Jewish  jargon),  82,000 
copies  were  distributed.  /\.nd  here  again  we  meet  with 
the  assertion  in  the  party  report  that  the  demand  is 
much  larger  than  tlie  supply.  The  number  of  readers 
during  the  following  year  increased  to  two  or  three 
times  the  number  in  1897. 

In  its  next  report,  for  1901-2,  the  "Bund"  gives 
the  following  figures:  printed  papers  (periodicals, 
leaflets,  proclamations),  398.150  copies;  strikes,  172; 
out  of  95  whose  result  was  known,  80  won,  3  partly 
won,  and  12  lost;  street  demonstrations,  30;  mani- 
festations in  synagogues  and  theaters.  14;  political 
strikes,  6;  secret  meetings,  260,  with  36,900  partici- 
pants. The  governor  of  Wilna,  Pahlen,  in  his  con- 
fidential memoir  of  October,  1903,  stated  that  "this 
political  movement  is  undoubtedly  a  result  of  the 
abnormal  position  of  the  Jews,  legal  and  economic, 
which  has  been  created  by  our  legislation.     A  revision 


502  RUSSIA  AND  ITS  CRISIS 

of  the  laws  concerning  the  Jews  is  absohitely  urgent, 
and  every  postponement  of  it  is  pregnant  with  most 
dangerous  consequences." 

The  same  reasoning  can  on  equally  good  grounds 
be  applied  to  the  position  created  by  the  measures  of 
the  Russian  government  dealing  with  two  other  nation- 
alities, inhabiting  opposite  borderlands  of  Russia  — 
Finland  and  the  Caucasus.  Previous  to  the  famous 
manifesto  of  1899,  which  violated  its  constitution, 
Finland  was  an  unusually  law-abiding  country.  Of 
course,  the  local  national  movement  was  very  strong; 
but  it  was  not  at  all  inconsistent  with  feelings  of  pro- 
found loyalty  such  as  perhaps  never  existed  in  Russia 
proper.  Years  of  arbitrary  rule  enforced  by  the  bru- 
tality of  the  Russian  police  were  needed  to  extirpate 
the  last  vestige  of  that  loyalty  and  to  rouse  that  peace- 
ful population  —  generally  characterized  by  a  phleg- 
matic, though  stubborn,  temperament  —  to  the  utmost 
hatred  and  anger  toward  everything  Russian.  I  do 
not  know  of  any  more  striking  or  dramatic  incident  in 
history  than  that  of  a  loyal  young  man,  in  the  role  of 
a  modern  Harmodius,  killing  the  tyrant,  and  then  in 
the  next  moment  killing  himself,  and  yet  signing  him- 
self as  a  "loyal  subject  of  his  majecty"  in  a  posthumous 
letter  in  which  he  implores  the  Tsar's  mercy  for  his 
people  and  his  country.  Up  to  the  very  last  moment 
these  Finnish  people  forebore  turning  to  the  side  of  the 
opposition ;  up  to  the  very  last  limit  of  endurance  the 
opposition  remained  passive ;  up  to  the  very  last  possi- 
bility the  opposition,  when  finally  turning  to  active 
resistance,  still  tried  to  remain  on  the  ground  of  legality 
and  right.     And  yet  they  were  bound  from  peaceful 


THE  URGENCY  OF  REFORM  503 

to  become  oppositionary,  from  a  passive  opposition  to 
become  active,  from  legal  to  turn  to  illegal  and  violent 
activity;  in  short,  while  beginning  with  most  humble 
petitions,  they  were  bound  to  end  with  conspiracy  and 
murder.  If  there  were  any  need  of  proving  that  auto- 
cracy breeds  revolution,  the  proof  is  furnished  by 
Finland. 

In  the  Caucasus  —  a  country  whose  inhabitants 
possess  a  southern  temperament  —  the  same  political 
change  took  place  in  a  much  shorter  time,  and  violence 
was  much  more  quickly  returned  with  violence.  Some 
few  years  ago  the  Armenian  revolutionaries  on  Rus- 
sian territory  were  planning  schemes  for  the  liberation 
of  their  compatriots  in  Turkey.  Now,  the  situation  on 
the  Russian  boundaries  in  the  Caucasus  does  not  differ 
in  any  respect  from  that  in  the  worst-governed  prov- 
inces of  Turkey.  I  have  seen  their  leaders,  and  have 
heard  them  use  language  such  as  I  had  heard  elsewhere 
only  in  Macedonia;  and,  as  in  Macedonia,  they  have  on 
their  side  the  best  of  conspiracies  to  back  them  and  to 
defend  them  against  Russian  persecution:  the  con- 
spiracy of  hatred  of  the  whole  population  toward  the 
common  oppressor.  What  produced  this  enormous 
change  in  the  situation?  Again  it  was  Mr.  Plehve's 
policy  —  his  device  to  take  from  the  Armenians  the  last 
refuge  of  their  nationality,  their  supreme  hope  in  a 
better  future:  their  national  school  and  the  material 
resources  of  their  national  church.  No  wonder  that 
they  bite  the  foot  that  tramples  on  the  most  delicate 
flowers  of  their  naticwial  life. 

We  see  that  the  policy  of  the  government  toward 
the  annexed  borderlands  created  new  enemies  for  the 


504  RUSSIA  AND  ITS  CRISIS 

autocracy,  and  thus  further  compHcated  the  task  of  its 
"self-defense,"  And,  at  the  same  time  that  disaffec- 
tion was  spreading-  wide  over  the  Russian  confines,  it 
struck  deep  and  deeper  roots  in  the  soil  of  Russia 
proper,  and  penetrated  to  such  social  strata  as  had 
never  before  been  touched  by  it.  The  universities  and 
factories  are  quite  honeycombed  with  political  agita- 
tion. Our  5^outh,  year  in,  year  out,  makes  sacrifice  of 
itself  for  the  cause  of  the  liberation  of  Russia,  with  the 
ardor  and  the  readiness  for  martyrdom  of  a  religious 
conviction,^^  No  regular  work  is  possible  now  for  the 
Russian  professor  or  student,  as  every  December  the 
political  tide  mounts  high,  and  it  does  not  ebb  away 

^^  In  order  to  characterize  the  disposition  of  mind  of  our  youth, 
I  translate  here  a  letter  of  a  very  young  girl  student,  which  may  serve 
to  introduce  American  readers  into  the  moral  and  mental  atmosphere 
of  a  Russian  street  demonstration,  and  to  show  why  these  protests 
will  never  cease,  in  spite  of  all  the  barbarous  cruelty  of  armed  force, 
so  long  as  that  disposition  and  the  causes  which  provoke  it  shall 
exist.  "The  demonstration  was  ordered  for  December  ii  [1904. 
St.  Petersburg].  Then  a  rumor  was  heard  that  it  had  been  postponed, 
owing  to  some  theoretical  variances  and  to  the  solicitations  of  the 
'  minority.'  But  as  early  as  Saturday  morning  I  knew  that  the 
demonstration  would  take  place.  And  we  began  to  prepare  ourselves. 
I  went  with  a  pure,  unburdened  heart,  all  joy  ;  and  I  was  not  the  only 
one.  We  all  —  all  my  friends  and  I  —  came  out  expecting  death, 
and  we  did  not  hope  ever  to  come  back  to  our  homes.  We  took 
leave  of  each  other,  and  we  were  shining  with  joy.  No  clouded  face, 
no  word  of  sorrow.  At  noon  we  were  at  the  Nevsky.  I  was 
instructed  that  the  banner  would  be  hoisted  at  the  corner  of  Nevsky 
and  Mihailovskaya,  and  naturally  we  tried  to  keep  close  to  that  place. 
As  the  hour  struck  one,  we  heard  shouts :  '  Come  here,  friends !  ' 
We  clustered  about  the  bearers  of  the  banners  (they  were  two),  sing- 
ing the  '  Marseillaise.'  We  moved  on  down  Nevsky,  whence  the 
cavalry  with  drawn  swords  was  already  charging  against  us.  In  two 
seconds  a  part  of  the  demonstrators  lay  scattered  over  Nevsky,  and 
the   rest  were  locked   in  some  shop Now   I   can   quietly   speak 


THE  URGENCY  OF  REFOR^I  505 

before  April.  In  January.  1905.  about  four  hundred 
professors  from  all  the  Russian  uni\  ersities  and  other 
higher  institutions  of  learning-  signed  a  declaration  in 
which  they  stated  that  no  educational  activity,  no  study 
of  science,  is  possible  so  long  as  politics  has  not  been 
granted  its  proper  channel  of  political  representation, 
and  that  no  independent  work  in  acquiring  or  imparting 
knowledge  can  be  done  until  guaranties  of  personal 
rights  have  been  given  and  educational  institutions 
have  been  relie^■ed  of  their  role  of  police  organs  in  the 
system  of  self-defense  of  the  autocracy. 

Political  disturbances  similar  to  those  endemic  in 
the  Russian  universities  have  now  become  a  permanent 
feature  of  factory  life.     The  workingmen  always  fra- 

(but  not  think)  of  what  followed.  I  can  forget  everything,  all  the 
joys  and  sorrows  of  my  life,  but  I  shall  never  forget  that,  especially 
the  horrible  moment  when,  with  my  body  writhing,  I  lay  down  and 
saw  the  horse's  shoe  swing  over  my  head,  and  saw  my  friends 
struck  and  wounded,  and  heard  their  cries  and  groans.  Of  our  own 
party,  my  friend  has  suffered :  she  was  severely  beaten  by  two 
policemen,  and  is  still  being  treated.  Other  people  escaped  with 
trifles:  some  were  pulled  by  the  hair,  others  had  their  legs  struck, 
and  some  their  teeth  damaged.  In  all,  they  say,  four  were  killed,  of 
whom  two  are  girl  students.  And  one  more  died  terror-stricken. 
....  In  the  evening  we  arranged  a  feast  of  the  Social  Democrat 
party.  It  was  at  the  hall  of  the  students  of  technology.  There  were 
many  speakers,  and  a  resolution  was  carried  ;  then  we  cried  :  '  Long 
live  the  International  and  the  Russian  Social  Democracy !  '  We  sang 
the  '  Marseillaise,'  and  with  flying  banners  we  entered  the  concert  hall, 
where  the  other  part  of  the  public,  after  music  and  song,  wished  to 
dance.  But  we  did  not  allow  them  to  do  so.  There  came  to  our 
assistance  some  students  from  a  meeting  held  in  a  neighboring  room, 
and  with  our  whole  force  we  expelled  the  '  bourgeoisie '  from  its 
legal  grounds.  The  meeting  was  resumed.  We  spoke,  we  sung,  we 
shouted  again.  Poor  Social  Revolutionaries !  They  tried  to  say 
something,  but  did  not  succeed  ;  they  proposed  a  demonstration  for 
the  13th,  but  it  was  declined." 


5o6  RUSSIA  AND  ITS  CRISIS 

ternize  with  the  students  and  unite  with  them  for  com- 
mon poHtical  action  against  the  autocracy.  A  few 
years  ago  May  i  (Labor  Day)  and  February  4  (the 
anniversary  of  the  emancipation  of  the  peasants)  were 
chiefly  chosen  for  the  demonstrations  of  the  worlving- 
men,  but  now  the  disturbances  are  Hkely  to  stop  the 
operation  of  the  factories  at  any  time,  and  they  are 
gradually  becoming  better  organized,  more  simultane- 
ous, and  more  conscious  of  their  political  significance.^® 

^^  Here  is  the  list  of  demonstrations  of  workingmen  beginning 
with  the  autumn  of  1901  and  ending  with  the  spring  of  1902  (the 
dates  are  given  according  to  the  old  style  of  reckoning)  :  Kishinev, 
September  11  ;  St.  Petersburg,  September  19;  Moscow,  November  8; 
Kharkov,  November  29  and  December  2  ;  Ekatherinoslav,  December 
15  and  16;  Keeyev,  February  2  and  3;  Mocow,  February  9; 
Ekatherinoslav,  February  17;  Rostov  upon  the  Don,  February  18; 
Odessa,  February  23  ;  St.  Petersburg,  March  3  ;  Krasnoyarsk  and 
Rostov  upon  the  Don,  April  18  ;  Bakoo,  April  21  ;  Sormovo,  May  i  ; 
Saratov,  May  5.  The  following  list  of  strikes  for  the  period  from 
May,  1903,  to  January,  1904,  will  complete  the  picture:  May  i: 
a  series  of  demonstrations  in  western  Russia,  the  Caucasus,  Tagan- 
rog, Youzovka,  Mareoopol,  Tomsk ;  strikes  in  St.  Petersburg, 
Irkootsk,  the  government  of  Tver ;  Kostroma,  May  5-23  ;  St.  Peters- 
burg, May  31-June  5  ;  other  strikes  in  May:  Nikolayev,  the  govern- 
ments of  Moscow  and  Cherneegov  ;  Oofa  ;  July :  Moscow,  Tomsk, 
Ivanovo-Vosnesensk,  Borisoglebsk,  Tiflis,  and  Bakoo  (general 
strike)  ;  Odessa  (partly  with  the  help  of  the  government),  Keeyev, 
Nikolayev,  Batoom,  Elisavetgrad,  and  some  others  ;  August :  Ekat- 
herinoslav, Cherneegov,  Berdeechev,  Kerch,  Simpheropol ;  September : 
Tomsk,  Bryansk,  Keeyev,  Moscow,  Odessa,  Grodno ;  October :  St. 
Petersburg,  Lodz,  Rovno,  Rostov  upon  the  Don,  Youzovka,  Taganrog ; 
November :  Tiflis,  Soovalkee,  Warsaw,  Kamennee  Brod,  Byalystok ; 
December:  ibidem  (general  strike),  Grondno,  Krasnoyarsk,  Eerman 
mines,  Parichee,  Ekatherinoslav  ;  January :  Minsk,  Riga,  Berdeechev, 
Bakoo.  Strikes  without  dates  during  the  same  period :  Arkhangelsk, 
Vilna,  Veetebsk,  the  government  of  Kherson,  Neekopol,  Warsaw, 
Shlobin,  Mozyr,  Bakhmoot,  Toolsha,  Pogachev  in  Volhynia,  Moosni- 
kee,  Mohilev,  Pinsk,  Sebastopol,  Vyaznikee. 


THE  URGENCY  OF  REFORM  507 

These  two  elements  —  the  students  and  the  work- 
ingmen  —  are  the  chief,  but  by  no  means  the  only, 
classes  disturbed  by  the  tidal  wave  of  the  revolution. 
We  have  already  mentioned  the  village.  Even  to  such 
people  as  have  never  visited  Russian  villages  it  is  clear 
th^t  some  new  element  is  now  found  there  which  tends 
to  make  life  unpleasant  for  the  former  landlords.  One 
of  our  chief  dignitaries  recently  made  the  statement 
that  nearly  every  day  complaints  are  lodged  with  him 
by  members  of  the  landed  gentry.  Just  wdiat  their 
grievances  are  is  not  always  easy  to  determine ;  but 
this  indefiniteness  in  itself  is  very  characteristic.  It  is 
not  only  agrarian  crimes  and  trespasses,  but  the  whole 
demeanor  of  the  peasants,  that  makes  them  uneasy. 
The  peasant  has  assumed  new  airs  which  are  as  far 
as  possible  from  the  subservience  and  humility  of  olden 
times.  Some  call  it  insolence  and  effrontery;  others 
call  it  self-consciousness  and  self-assertion ;  but  the 
fact  itself  of  the  existence  of  this  new  spirit  is  beyond 
dispute.  How  did  it  invade  the  village?  Different 
reasons  are  given  in  different  cases.  In  one  place  it  is  a 
workingman  from  the  "organized"  Labor  Party,  who, 
sent  by  the  government  into  a  remote  village  —  his 
birthplace  —  acquainted  his  fellow-citizens  with  the 
current  topics  of  general  politics.  At  another  place  it 
is  a  student  who  scattered  among  the  peasants  a  few 
revolutionary  leaflets  which  he  brought  with  him  for 
his  holidays  —  or  perhaps  his  place  of  exile  —  in  his 
native  country.  But  more  often  it  is  one  of  numerous 
vagrants  who,  returning  to  his  village  with  a  few  dol- 
lars in  his  pocket  and  some  new  ideas  in  his  head,  is 
always  welcome,   if  he  brings  home  some  indefinite 


5o8  RUSSIA  AND  ITS  CRISIS 

rumors  about  new  land  to  be  granted  by  the  state. 
From   whatever   source,  the   spirit   of   the   new   time 
pours  into  the  village  through  ever}^  chink  left  open; 
and  the  more  so  because  all  normal  avenues  are  stopped 
up.     And  while  entering  the  village,  not  by  the  large 
channel  of  general  enlightenment,  but  by  clandestine 
ways  of  hear-say  evidence,  the  modern  spirit  only  too 
often  assumes  a  distorted  shape  in  the  minds  of  the 
peasants  and  manifests  itself  by  unsystematized  out- 
breaks of  violence.     Local  outbreaks  of  this  kind  are 
traditional  in  the  Russian  village.     From  time  to  time 
they  will  spread  over  more  or  less  extended  regions, 
like  prairie  fires,  and  as  quickly  die  out,  leaving  only 
ashes  and  devastation.^'     One  of  the  latest  agrarian 
uprisings    of    this  —  almost    spontaneous  —  type    oc- 
curred in  May,  1902,  in  the  governments  of  Poltava 
and  Harkov.     Eighty  estates  of  the  local  gentry  were 
ransacked   by   the   peasants,    who   did   not   assail   the 
owners,  but  "peacefully"  took  from  their  barns  grain, 
hay,  and  potatoes.     Their  excuse  was  that  they  had 
nothing  to  eat  (there  being  a  local  famine),  while  the 
landlords  had  more  than  ^vas  necessary.      Afterwards 
the  Cossacks  were  sent  to  the  villages,   where  they 
behaved  themselves  as   if  they  were  in  a  conquered 
country :  the  peasants  were  scourged  and  flogged,  their 
wives  and  daughters  were  violated,  and  a  contribution 
of  $400,000  was  levied  by  Mr.  Plehve  on  the  starving 
population,  without  discriminating  between  the  guilty 
and  the  innocent,  and  without  previously  determining 
the  amount  of  damage  suffered  by  the  landowners. 
We  know   that   at  the  same  time  an   "Agrarian 

^'  See  p.  359- 


THE  URGENCY  OF  REFOR^I  509 

League"  was  formed  by  the  Social  Revolutionaries, 
with  the  direct  aim  of  systematizing  the  agrarian  move- 
ment and  of  organizing  the  disaffected  elements  among 
the  peasants.  In  July  of  the  same  year  (1902)  the 
provincial  governors  recei^'ed  frouT  the  department  of 
police  a  secret  communication,  that 

in  various  parts  of  Russia  there  appear  some  unknown  young 
men,  who  pass  by  in  railroad  trains  or  carriages,  or  on  horseback 
along  the  by-ways,  or  e^'en  walk  afoot  through  the  villages ;  and 
all  these  people  throw  from  the  car  windows  or  carriages  revolu- 
tionary leaflets,  or  distribute  them  among  the  peasants  passing  by. 
....  Sometimes  these  publications  are  surreptitiously  thrust  into 
houses  or  yards ;  sometimes  they  are  openly  placed  in  the  peas- 
ants' carts  at  the  time  of  public  fairs. 

Up  to  this  point  the  government  communication  may 
remind  us  of  the  methods  of  propaganda  used  some 
forty  years  ago  and  disclosed  by  the  political  processes 
of  that  time.  But  this  is  what  is  new  : 
The  leaflets  mentioned  are  willingly  read  by  the  peasants,  and 
they  pass  from  one  reader  to  another ;  sometimes  they  are  even 
publicly  read  before  a  crowd  of  peasants.  And,  after  having  made 
themselves  acquainted  with  the  contents  of  that  literature,  the 
peasants  begin  to  look  for  a  coming  division  of  the  landlords' 
estates  among  themselves ;  and  their  relations  with  the  neighbor- 
ing landlords  become  more  or  less  strained. 

This  epic  report  of  the  police  evidently  does  not 
overstate  the  success  of  the  agrarian  propaganda. 
And,  indeed,  in  two  years  the  "  Agrarian  Branch  "  of 
the  Social  Revolutionary  party  published  about  a  dozen 
leaflets,  in  120.000  copies;  and  it  spread  them,  to- 
gether with  other  publications,  in  forty-four  govern- 
ments; i.  e.,  nearly  over  all  Russia.  The  contents  of 
the  pamphlets  do  not  quite  correspond  to  the  impres- 
sion which  they  make  upon  the  peasants  —  if  we  are  to 


5IO  RUSSIA  AND  ITS  CRISIS 

believe  the  government  communication.  To  be  sure, 
the  "division  of  land"  remains  the  starting-point  ol 
this  propaganda;  and  it  is  certainly  the  most  interest- 
ing part  of  it  for  the  peasants.  But  the  Social  Revolu- 
tionaries try  to  build  upon  that  desire  of  the  peasants 
a  whole  system  of  policy.  Their  aim  is  to  give  to  the 
agrarian  movement  the  same  character  as  has  already 
been  assumed  by  the  other  currents  of  the  revolutionary 
movement ;  /.  e.,  a  political  character.  They  suggest  to 
the  peasants  that  their  chief  enemy  is  the  Tsar,  and 
that  their  desire  for  the  "  partition  of  land  "  cannot  be 
realized  without  political  representation  on  the  prin- 
ciple of  universal  suffrage.^  ^  They  do  not  expect  the 
peasants  to  be  able  themselves  to  bring  about  a  social 
revolution ;  and,  while  organizing  their  most  advanced 
followers  in  a  series  of  circles  or  committees  of  a 
"  Peasants'  Alliance,"  they  seem  to  confine  their  role  in 
the  general  revolutionary  movement  chiefly  to  the 
refusal  to  pay  taxes  and  to  serve  in  the  army.  This  is 
very  far  from  the  "  riots  "  of  a  quarter  of  a  century 
ago;  but  to  change  the  mind  of  the  peasants  is  much 
more  difficult  than  to  change  the  mind  of  the  revolu- 
tionaries; and  if  an  agrarian  movement  on  a  larger 
scale  is  to  come  at  present,  it  is  more  than  probable  that 
the  ancient,  not  the  modern,  elements,  of  the  agrarian 

"The  Tsars  Alexander  III.  and  Nicholas  II.  themselves  have 
contributed  very  much  to  dissociate  in  the  minds  of  the  peasants  the 
ancient  connotations  of  "  autocracy "  and  "  democratism."  Both, 
in  the  beginning  of  their  reigns,  in  speeches  to  the  delegates  of  the 
peasants,  disclaimed  the  popular  expectations  of  a  coming  "  general 
land  partition,"  and  advised  the  peasants  to  obey  the  marshals  of 
nobility.  A  picture  representing  the  Tsar  pronouncing  these  words 
is  officially  placarded  by  the  board  of  every  village  administration 
community. 


THE  URGENCY  OF  REFORM  511 

program  will  receive  the  chief  emphasis;  so  much  the 
more  as  these — the  "Poogachov" — points  are  also  in- 
cluded in  the  program  of  the  Social  Revolutionaries. 

The  university,  the  factory,  and  even  the  village  — 
these  are  more  or  less  customary  and  habitual  spheres 
of  revolutionary  agitation ;  and  we  have  already  met 
them  at  an  earlier  stage  of  the  revolutionary  move- 
ment. It  is,  however,  of  importance  to  mention  that 
new  groups  are  freshly  invaded  by  the  same  feeling  of 
disaffection  at  the  present  stage  of  that  movement. 

The  teachers  in  the  middle  and  elementary  schools 
have  joined  in  the  revolutionary  movement.  They 
have  organized  an  "  alliance  "  which  is  formally  affil- 
iated with  the  Social  Revolutionary  party  (1903). 
The  students  in  the  colleges  and  secondary  schools  soon 
followed  their  example.  One  would  be  loath  to  believe 
that  things  had  gone  so  far,  if  there  were  not  first-hand 
evidence.  Let  me  quote  from  a  confidential  letter, 
addressed  by  the  minister  of  the  interior,  the  late  Mv. 
Plehve,  to  the  minister  of  public  instruction,  Mr. 
Sanger  (May,  1903)  : 

Among  the  papers  confiscated  on  the  occasion  of  the  search 
of  the  home  of  a  pupil  of  the  seventh  class  of  the  St.  Petersburg 
Third  Realschule,  Avel  Rosenoer,  a  copy  has  been  found  of 
No.  2  of  the  periodical  To  the  Light  for  the  current  year,  repro- 
duced by  means  of  a  mimeograph.  The  periodical  is  edited  by  the 
executive  committee  of  the  "  St.  Petersburg  Organization  for 
Middle  Schools.".  .  .  .  The  editorial  discusses  various  forms  for 
giving  utterance  to  a  protest  against  the  present  obstacles  to  free 
thought  and  free  study,  and  it  mentions  the  existence  of  the  fol- 
lowing anti-governmental  organizations  started  on  a  more  or  less 
large  scale:  (i)  the  Harkov  Alliance  of  Undergraduates;  (2) 
the  Keeyev  Central  Branch  of  the  United  Circles  and  Organiza- 
tions of  the  Middle  Schools;    (3)  the  Southern  Russian  Group 


512  RUSSIA  AND  ITS  CRISIS 

of  Undergraduates ;  (4)  the  St.  Petersburg  Organization  of  the 
Middle  Schools.  Besides  these  four  main  organizations,  there 
exist  secondary  circles  and  groups  in  Moscow,  Neeshnee,  Pskov, 
Minsk,  Irkootsk,  Yaroslav,  Novgorod,  Penza,  Orel,  Toola,  Kos- 
tromah,  Serpoohov,  Saratov,  Cheeta,  Byalostok,  Wilna,  Warsaw, 
Simbirsk,  Samara,  Kalooga,  Vittebsk,  and  Yekaterinburg.  They 
are  all  in  constant  correspondence  with  the  St.  Petersburg 
organization,  and  their  final  aim  is  to  found  an  alliance  for  the 
whole  of  Russia.  The  editorial  states  that  in  one  of  the  cities  of 
central  Russia  the  students  of  the  colleges  have  founded  a 
"  fighting  branch "  for  active  opposition  to  the  detestable  school 
regime;  in  the  south  the  circles  of  undergraduates  have  included 
in  their  program  the  study  of  socialism;  several  provincial 
organizations  have  started  periodicals :  in  Orel,  The  Word  of 
Youth;  in  Minsk,  Forivard;  in  Neeshnee,  The  Youth.  They 
now  are  anxious  to  start  a  periodical  for  the  whole  of  Russia. 
Often  the  undergraduates  have  organized  congresses  in  Perm, 
Moscow,  Rostov,  Keeyev,  Saratov,  and  Warsaw,  in  order  to  dis- 
cuss plans  for  further  activity. 

Another  sphere  of  political  propaganda  formerly 
left  untouched  but  now  opened,  is  the  army.  Some 
organizations,  as  for  instance  the  "  Bund,"  carry  on  a 
systematic  propaganda  among  the  soldiers;  others  do 
it  occasionally;  and  the  result  seems  already  to  be 
important  enough  to  render  the  government  uneasy. 
The  Russian  underground  press  has  published  series  of 
official  "  circulars "  which  state  that  revolutionary 
pamphlets  are  often  circulating  in  the  barracks ;  and 
cases  of  disobedience  on  political  grounds  are  becom- 
ing more  and  more  frequent.^ ^     In  an  official  (secret) 

"In  August,  1902,  General  Kooropatkin,  then  minister  of  war, 
addressed  the  following  secret  message  to  the  commanders  of  the 
military  districts :  "  The  attempts  of  political  agitators  to  spread 
propaganda  in  the  army,  formerly  comparatively  rare,  have  in  recent 
time  become  more  prevalent,  and  are  carried  on  so  boldly  that  it  is 
necessary   to  give   serious  attention  to   them.     From   the   reports   of 


THE  URGENCY  OF  REFORM  513 

document  from  February,  1903,  the  success  of  the 
propaganda  is  admitted  as  a  fact,  and  its  possibiHty  is 
explained  by  the  change  in  the  composition  of  the  army. 
"In  former  times,"  the  document  states,  "the  term  of 
service  was  much  longer,  the  soldiers  were  recruited 
almost  exclusively  from  the  Russian  population,  and 
the  officers  mostly  belonged  to  the  gentry;  that  is  why 
it  was  comparatively  easy  to  maintain  internal  dis- 
cipline. But  now,  with  the  military  service  made 
obligatory  for  all  and  the  term  shortened,  with  the 
soldiers  coming  from  various  ethnic  groups  and  their 
feeling  of  personal  dignity  ever  increasing,  and  with 

military  commanders,  and  from  communications  of  the  ministers  of 
justice  and  of  the  interior,  the  following  facts  appear:  (i)  In  May 
1 901,  proclamations  were  found  in  the  barracks  of  the  11 6th  Mal- 
syaroslavl  infantry  regiment.  (2)  In  the  same  month  two  leaflets  of 
mutinous  content,  entitled  Politics  and  Officers  and  Abolition  of 
Standing  Armies,  were  sent  from  abroad  to  the  address  of  the  staff- 
captain  of  the  141st  Moshaysk  infantry  regiment.  (3)  In  August  all 
the  officers  of  the  twenty-seventh  infantry  division  received  from 
fictitious  postmen  proclamations  '  To  the  Officers,'  sent  by  the 
'  Social  Democratic  group  in  Vilna.'  In  these  documents  the  officers 
were  reproached  because,  in  compliance  with  the  orders  of  their 
superiors,  they  played  the  part  of  '  executioners  of  honest  laborers,' 
and  they  were  urged  to  give  up  that  part.  (4)  A  copy  of  that  same 
proclamation  was  then  (February,  1902)  sent  by  mail  to  the  officers 
of  the  Moscow  garrison  and  to  the  officers'  rifle  school.  (5)  in  Janu- 
ary, 1902,  an  officer  of  the  ninth  Siberian  regiment  received  a  letter 
inviting  all  officers  to  resign  from  military  service.  ^(6)  In  the  same 
month  a  manuscript  was  circulated  among  the  soldiers  of  the  sixty- 
fifth  Moscow  infantry  regiment,  the  sixty-sixth  Booteerkee  infantry 
regiment,  and  the  twenty-first  White-Russian  dragoon  regiment ;  it 
was  written  by  hand  and  lithographed  in  the  regiments'  chanceries, 
and  it  contained  a  revolutionary  imitation  of  '  Our  Father,'  inviting 
the  soldiers  to  revolt  against  their  superiors.  (7)  In  February  and 
March  proclamations  were  sent  to  the  officers  of  the  St.  Petersburg 
garrison,  inviting  them  to  side  with  the  students  in  their  political 
demonstrations.     (8)  In  April  the  officers  of  the  Vilna  garrison  again 


514  RUSSIA  AND  ITS  CRISIS 

the  body  of  officers  of  mixed  origin,  the  task  of  pre- 
serving order  is  made  much  more  compHcated."  This 
may  explain  why  the  "  Cossacks  "  alone  are  considered 
entirely  reliable,  and  are  generally  used  to  suppress 
disturbances,  while  other  sections  of  the  army  have 
more  than  once  demonstrated  their  aversion  to  that 
business,  and  sometimes  have  even  refused  to  fire. 

Owing  to  this  enormous  increase  in  political  agita- 
tion during  the  last  ten  years,  the  task  of  the  state 
police,  as  well  as  that  of  the  organs  of  prosecution  for 
political  crimes,  has  become  very  burdensome.  A  large 
part  of  Russia  is  permanently  kept  in  a  state  of  siege  in 

received  by  mail  proclamations  from  the  '  Russian  Social  Democratic 
Labor  Party,'  persuading  them  to  join  the  '  general  Russian  revolu- 
tionary movement.'  (9)  In  the  same  month  a  large  number  of  copies 
of  a  proclamation  from  the  '  Siberian  Social  Democratic  Alliance ' 
were  thrust  into  the  barracks  of  the  Krasnoyarsk  garrison,  urging 
the  soldiers  not  to  raise  arms  against  their  brothers  —  peasants  and 
workingmen  struggling  for  a  just  cause.  (10)  In  April  and  May  a 
proclamation  was  widely  circulated  among  the  soldiers  of  the  thir- 
teenth infantry  division,  who  were  invited  to  disobey  the  Tsar,  and 
to  throw  off  the  authorities  as  lawless  and  unjust ;  whereupon 
attempts  at  propaganda  among  the  soldiers  were  disclosed,  and  many 
agitators  were  found  to  belong  to  the  mariners  of  Sevastopol.  (11) 
In  March,  1902,  a  well-organized  propaganda  among  the  soldiers  of 
the  Yekatereenoslav  grenadier  regiment  was  discovered.  In  this 
regiment  the  soldiers  themselves  functioned  as  propagandists,  and 
at  their  head  was  a  noble,  who  had  given  up  his  right  to  a  shorter 
term  of  service  for  the  express  purpose  of  carrying  on  the  propa- 
ganda  Some  soldiers  helped  him  directly  ;    others  knew  of  the 

propaganda,  but  did  not  denounce  it.  Particular  attention  must  be 
called  to  the  fact  that  an  officer  of  the  1326  Simpheropol  regiment 
took  part  in  the  agrarian  disturbances  which  recently  occurred  in  the 
southern  provinces  of  Russia.  These  instances  of  propaganda  in  the 
army  are  by  far  not  the  only  ones ;  there  exist  good  reasons  for 
believing  that  a  great  many  other  instances  have  remained  undis- 
closed  " 


THE  URGENCY  OF  REFORM  515 

order  the  more  closely  to  control  political  movements.-'^ 
But  the  ordinary  means  of  political  control  introduced 
by  the  "  temporary  measures "  of  twenty  years  ago 
have  proved  insufficient ;  and  the  state  police  have  been 
obliged  to  organize,  in  the  provinces,  new  centers  of 
political  observation,  directly  connected  with  the  cen- 
tral, perfected  system  of  espionage  at  St.  Petersburg. 
After  the  murder  of  Mr.  Sippyagin,  new  agencies  were 
established  in  twenty  provincial  towns,  and  to  many 
other  places  special  agents  were  continuously  dis- 
patched. This  greatly  increased  the  expense,  and  the 
budget  of  the  ministry  of  the  interior  for  the  purpose 
of  secret  political  observation  will  give  a  fairly  good 
idea  of  how  much  the  oppositionary  movement  has 
grown.  From  1883  onward  the  "secret  fund"  of  the 
ministry  was  952,712  rubles  a  year.  Up  to  1896  — 
during  the  thirteen  years  of  comparative  rest  of  the 
oppositionary  activity  —  this  was  more  than  sufficient. 
Thus  a  very  large  "  sinking  fund  "  was  formed  from 
the  residues.  Beginning  with  1894,  owing  to  "the 
increased  activity  of  the  anti-governmental  societies, 
and  to  disturbances  among  the  students,  the  working- 
men,  and  the  peasants"  (as  the  official  document  from 
which  we  here  quote  states  it),  the  yearly  expenditure 
from  the  "secret  fund"  increased  as  shown  in  table 
on  following  page. 

This  increased  expenditure  compelled  the  ministry 
to  resort  to  the  sinking  fund  in  order  to  cover  the 
yearly  deficits  (growing  from  82,596  rubles  in  1896 
to  1,197,154  in  1903) ;  and,  besides  this  yearly  expense, 
another  million    (1,143,446),   for  unnamed  purposes, 

""See  the  map  facing  p.  188. 


5i6 


RUSSIA  AND  ITS  CRISIS 


was  borrowed  from  the  same  source.  Thus,  all  the 
reserve  funds  having  been  si>ent  (or  embezzled),  the 
ministry  was  obliged  to  ask  for  new  credits  —  just  at 
the  time  when  all  the  other  ministers  were  cutting  down 


1894 

1903 

For  new  agencies 

For  the  same  pur] 

For  central  boarc 

and    separate 

aside  from  their 

within  the  empire 

jose  abroad 

s  (departments  of 

corps   of    gendarn 

ordinary  budget  . 

police 
nerie). 

Rubles 

330,000 

64,000 

170,000 

Rubles 

1,424,737 
178,665 

454,636 

Total 

564,000 

2,058,038 

their  ordinary  expenses  in  view  of  the  Russo-Japanese 
war.  The  "secret  fund"  was  increased  frcfm  952,712 
to  2,135,189  rubles  yearly. 

Another  —  and  not  a  less  instructive  —  criterion  of 
the  growth  of  the  oppositionary  movement  is  the  in- 
crease in  the  number  of  political  criminals.  Since, 
with  a  few  isolated  exceptions,  there  have  existed,  dur- 
ing the  last  twenty  years,  no  regular  procedure  and  no 
regular  courts  of  justice  for  political  crimes,^^  political 
criminals  in  Russia  are  such  as  are  found  guilty  by  the 
police,  with  the  obliging  connivance  of  the  state  pros- 
ecutors. The  result  is  that  the  office  of  public  prosecu- 
tor is  generally  considered  as  having  nothing  to  do  with 
the  idea  of  justice;  and  the  position  is  shirked  by  every 
man  of  honor.  Political  crime  is  considered  by  public 
opinion  to  be  no  crime  at  all ;  and  to  be  branded  as  a 
political  criminal  by  the  police  is  a  mark  of  distinction, 
gradually  becoming  a  quite  necessary  qualification  for 
everybody  who  claims  to  advocate  liberal  public 
opinion. 

"  See  pp.  189-92. 


THE  URGENCY  OF  REFORM 


517 


The  number  of  persons  yearly  receiving  this  pre- 
hminary  quahfication  is  growing-  at  a  very  rapid  rate, 
as  may  be  judged  from  the  following  table: 


1894 

189s 

1896 

1897 

1898  1899 

1900 

1901 

1902 

1903 

Foreigners  sent  away  from  Russia. 

5 
21 

34 
244 
156 

29 

6 
42 

66 
2ig 
104 

20 

I 
53 

42 
218 
102 

16 

II 
117 

Ti 
767 
148 

92 

2 

47 

IIQ 
440 
162 

88 

II 

49 

105 
308 

108 
195 

I 
49 

85 
618 

57 
102 

9 

38 

SI 
486 
203 
141 

10 

"5 

77 
193 
362 
217 

31 
910 

592 

1,268 

332 

84s 

Exiled  to   remote   parts  of  Euro- 
pean Russia 

Put  under  "open  surveillance ". . . 
Punished  by  imprisonment 

Total 

489 

457 

432 

1,214 

858 

776 

912 

928 

974 

3,978 

But  large  as  is  the  number  of  qualified  political 
criminals,  the  number  of  candidates  for  that  honorable 
distinction  is  still  greater.  In  Russia  there  exists  no 
"habeas  corpus,"  and  thus  candidates  are  always  wel- 
come to  a  "preliminary  confinement"  likely  to  last 
many  months  and  to  end,  not  in  acquittal  —  because 
there  is  no  acquittal  where  there  is  no  legal  procedure 
—  but  in  exile  by  the  police  (as  proof  that  the  police 
cannot  be  wrong).  Below  w^e  cite  the  official  figures 
of  the  number  of  persons  accused  of  political  crime : 
1894 919  1899 1.884 


1895. 
1896. 

1897. 


944 

1900 

1,668 

1901 

1,427 

1902 

1,144 

1903 

.1.580 
■  1.784 

•  3.744 

•  5,590 


But  we  have  now  sufficient  proof  as  to  how  acute 
is  the  present  political  situation  in  Russia.  The  particu- 
lar difficulty  of  this  situation  is  that  in  proportion  as 
the  revolutionary  movement  grows  stronger  and  more 
dangerous,  the  gap  between  the  revolutionaries  and  the 
government  also  widens.   The  only  hope  for  a  peaceful 


5i8  RUSSIA  AND  ITS  CRISIS 

issue  rests  with  such  elements  as,  either  by  their  social 
position  or  by  their  political  views,  are  intermediate 
between  the  rulers  and  the  revolutionaries ;  /.  e.,  which 
are  oppositionary  without  being  revolutionary.  The 
political  importance  of  this  group  depends  chiefly  upon 
this  intermediate  position,  and  grows  in  proportion  as 
the  role  of  intermediators  is  required  by  the  general 
political  situation.  The  program  of  the  group  also 
depends  largely  upon  the  general  state  of  public  opinion 
at  a  given  moment,  being  more  or  less  advanced  accord- 
ing to  the  more  or  less  pronounced  radicalism  of  this 
opinion.  It  thus  reflects  public  opinion;  with  public 
opinion  it  stands  or  falls.  Accordingly,  the  possibility 
of  a  peaceful  outcome  for  the  Russian  political  unrest 
depends  entirely  upon  the  circumstance  whether  or  not 
it  will  be  possible  for  this  political  group  to  influence 
the  government  without  becoming  untrue  to  the  public 
opinion  which  is  the  only  source  of  its  power.  It 
remains  for  us  to  consider  what  are  at  the  present 
juncture  the  aspirations  of  this  group,  and  how  these 
aspirations  are  met  by  the  government;  and  then  we 
shall  be  able  to  form  an  opinion  as  to  whether  or  not 
any  peaceful  issue  is  possible  in  the  immediate  future. 
The  present  state  of  public  opinion  has  had  its 
share  of  influence  upon  the  Russian  liberals  —  the 
political  group  of  which  we  shall  now  speak.  The  work 
begun  by  them  twenty  years  ago  they  are  now  pursu- 
ing with  renewed  vigor  and  much  greater  determina- 
tion. They  have  again  their  political  organ  abroad  — 
the  Ejnancipation  (Osvoboshdaneya) ,  since  1902  edited 
by  Mr.  Struve,  formerly  in  Stuttgart,  and  now  in  Paris. 
This  new  organ  reminds  one  of  the  Free  Word  pub- 


THE  URGENCY  OF  REFORM  519 

lished  by  Mr.  Dragonianov  twenty  years  ago,  but  it 
keeps  in  much  closer  contact  with  Russian  HberaHsm 
within  the  empire,  and  is  much  more  strongly  sup- 
ported by  the  latter,  thus  being  better  entitled  to  the 
name  of  party  organ.  The  Emancipation  is  backed  by 
an  organized  group  of  the  "  Alliance  for  the  Emancipa- 
tion," which,  like  the  socialistic  parties,  has  its  com- 
mittees in  all  imix)rtant  cities  of  Russia.  The  alliance 
in  its  turn  is  supported  by  a  much  larger  circle  of  sym- 
pathizing adherents,  who,  if  circumstances  are  pro- 
pitious, will  form  an  actual  political  party. 

Such  a  party,  of  course,  cannot  represent  Russian 
liberalism  of  all  shades,  because  the  shades  are  too  vari- 
ous, and  because  everybody  in  Russia  is  liberal  at  a 
moment  like  the  present.  But  it  will  form  the  left  wing 
of  Russian  liberalism,  and  its  political  program  will 
correspond  to  the  name  by  which  many  of  its  members 
call  themselves  now  :  "  Democratic  Constitutionalists." 
They  are  and  will  remain  constitutionalists,  because 
they  want  the  constitution  to  be  a  real  thing,  not  a 
fiction.  They  are  decidedly  opposed  to  any  half- 
measures  and  governmental  tricks  such  as  "Loris 
Melikov's  constitution."  They  also  no  longer  speak  of 
the  re-establishment  of  the  ancient  Russian  Zcmskce 
Sohor  —  the  consultative  assembly  of  the  Muscovite 
state.  They  wish  a  real  political  representation  such  as 
every  civilized  country  all  the  world  over  now  pos- 
sesses ;  they  want  given  to  the  Russian  people  the  right 
of  legislation,  of  voting  the  budget,  and  of  control  over 
the  administration.  Within  these  limits  there  still 
remains  much  room  for  important  differences  of  opin- 
ion, and  some  of  the  disagreements  are  discussed  in  the 


520  RUSSIA  AND  ITS  CRISIS 

pages  of  the  above-mentioned  periodical.  The  results 
of  this  discussion  are  to  bring  different  views  closer 
together,  and  thus  to  bring  about  a  still  greater  uni- 
formity of  opinion  within  the  limits  of  organized 
liberalism.  Thus.  c.  g.,  universal  suffrage,  which  for- 
merly was  not  generally  accepted  by  the  party,  now 
constitutes  one  of  the  chief  features  of  its  political 
creed  —  the  feature  which  gives  it  the  right  to  call  itself 
democratic. 

If  we  compare  that  program  with  what  we  know  to 
have  been  the  state  of  liberal  opinion  twenty  years  ago, 
we  at  once  see  that  of  the  five  different  schemes  for 
political  reform  which  we  then  enumerated,^-  only  two 
are  seriously  discussed,  while  the  other  three,  character- 
izing the  extreme  right  and  the  extreme  left  of  old-time 
liberalism,  seem  to  have  been  entirely  abandoned.^^  An 
attempt  is  being  made  to  combine  these  two  schemes. 
The  plan  for  a  four-storied  representation  of  the  people 
by  the  deputies  of  the  provincial  Zemstvo  assemblies  is 
still  clung  to  by  the  more  moderate  liberals  for  the 
upper  house;  and  this  plan  is  also  the  last  vestige  of 
the  formerly  so  popular  "  federalism."  But  even  under 
this  plan  the  fundamental  idea  is  that  the  lowest  stage 
of  representation  —  that  of  the  district  Zemstvos  —  is 
to  be  founded  upon  a  general  vote  in  the  townships. 
The  partisans  of  that  view  admit  that  there  must  be 
another  —  a  lower  —  house  of  representatives  elected 

^^  See  pp.  306  ff. 

^^This  was  written  before  the  events  of  1904-5.  which  discredited 
the  government  to  such  an  extent  as  to  make  the  liberals  indorse  the 
demand  for  a  "  constitutional  convention,"  originally  claimed  by  the 
socialists.  The  expectations  of  the  two  groups  from  a  freely  elected 
constitutional  convention  of  course  remain  quite  different. 


THE  URGENCY  OF  REFORM  521 

by  universal  suffrage.  A  draft  of  a  constitution  \vori<e(l 
out  on  these  lines  has  recently  been  circulating  in  Rus- 
sian political  circles,  and,  as  was  to  be  expected,  it  met 
with  opposition  on  the  part  of  the  more  democratic  ele- 
ments of  the  party. 

The  arguments  of  the  adherents  of  the  bicameral 
system  are  chiefly  two.  In  the  first  place,  they  argue 
that  there  must  be  an  upper  house  to  represent  the 
local  interests  of  the  provinces,  side  by  side  with  the 
representation  of  the  people  at  large.  To  this  their 
opponents  object  that  there  are  no  local  units  in  Russia 
proper  corresponding  to  the  American  states  or  the 
French  provinces  before  the  Revolution,  and  thus  far 
no  elements  of  "federalism,"  the  existing  Russian  prov- 
inces being  of  purely  administrative  origin.  '  Further- 
more, such  provinces  —  of  a  historically  independent 
origin  —  as  Poland  and  the  Caucasus  ^-^  would  not  be 
satisfied  with  a  representation  in  the  senate  or  upper 
house,  as  their  chief  claim  is  for  more  or  less  extended 
self-government. 

The  other  argument  advanced  in  favor  of  an 
upper  house  is  that  it  will  represent  a  higher  stage 
of  intelligence  —  and,  therefore,  perhaps  more  liberal- 
ism. This  argument  is  founded  upon  a  double  appre- 
hension ;  namely,  that  the  general  vote  may  be  misused 
either  by  absolutism,  by  the  pressure  of  bureaucracy,  or 
by  "  dem.agogues "  from  the  extreme  parties.  Indi- 
rectly, this  is  an  argument  against  the  general  vote,  and 
its  point  is  that  the  people  of  Russia  are  not  yet  ri|)e  for 
universal  suffrage.    The  argument  is  not  new,  as  it  has 

■*  Finland  is  not  mentioned  here,  as  it  has  its  own  political 
representation. 


522  RUSSIA  AND  ITS  CRISIS 

always  been  used  by  reactionaries  of  all  countries 
against  every  decisive  movement  in  the  line  of  progress. 
This  was,  indeed,  the  argument  of  the  defenders  of 
American  slavery  and  of  Russian  serfdom.  The 
answer  of  the  democratic  liberals  is,  that  there  is  no 
essential  difference  between  the  Russian  people  and 
many  others  who  are  enjoying  the  privilege  of  uni- 
versal suffrage  without  endangering  the  social  order 
and  with  great  profit  to  the  social  peace;  that  there 
never  was  a  people  that  was  "  ripe  "  for  a  constitution 
when  that  constitution  was  first  introduced;  and  that 
the  establishment  of  free  political  institutions  is  the 
only  way  to  educate  a  people  for  political  life.  No 
restrictions  of  the  franchise  are  possible  in  Russia 
without  spreading  a  feeling  of  great  injustice,  and  thus 
disseminating  the  germs  of  further  internal  struggle, 
because  there  are  no  marked  differences  between  the 
various  strata  of  Russian  society.  On  the  other  hand, 
there  is  no  ground  for  apprehension  that  the  first  Rus- 
sian parliament  will  be  a  "  Parliament  of  Saints  or 
Levelers,"  and  that  it  will  end  in  the  dictatorship  of  a 
new  Cromwell.  On  the  contrary,  one  may  hope  that 
the  actual  practice  of  general  suffrage  will  do  more 
than  anything  else  to  disillusionize  the  socialists  and  to 
free  them  from  one  more  of  those  Utopias  preserved 
by  their  theoricians  from  the  earlier  stages  of  their 
political  education.  The  mere  existence  of  an  upper 
house  will  serve  to  prolong  the  period  of  theoretic 
struggle  in  politics,  as  it  will  always  be  suspected  of 
defending  class  interests,  and  its  introduction  will 
undoubtedly  be  considered  as  treason  to  the  principle 
of  direct  and  general  representation. 


THE  URGENCY  OF  REFORM  523 

Which  of  the  two  views  will  prevail  and  form  a 
foundation    for    the    coming    reconstruction    depends 
chiefly  on  the  general  political  situation.    This  situation 
has  changed  much  since  the  beginning  of  the  struggle 
of  the  liberals  with  the  government,  and  the  longer  any 
concessions  are  withheld,  the  more  radical  becomes  the 
liberal  program.     We  have  seen  the  liberals  suspected 
of  "landlordism"  and  aristocratism  by  the  more  ad- 
vanced public  opinion,   when   they  first   appeared   as 
a  distinct  political  group  in  the  sixties;    and  we  have 
seen  that  this  deprived  their  political  program  of  any 
moral  influence  either  on  the  government  or  on  public 
opinion.     In  the  second  period  of  their  struggle,  in  the 
seventies,  the  liberals  were  much  more  strongly  sup- 
ported by  the  public  opinion  of  the  educated  classes; 
but  the  revolutionists  remained  opposed  to  them,  and 
they  in  their  turn  were  ready  to  help  the  government 
against   the  revolutionists.      Since   then   both   groups 
have  learned  better  than  to  fight  each  other   while 
opposing   the   common    enemy.      We   have    seen    the 
socialists  and  the  revolutionists  confessing  that  their 
failure  is  to  be  partly  explained  by  insufficient  support 
from  the  educated  classes.^^     At  the  same  time,  the 
liberals   have   come   to   realize  that   no   partial   com- 
promises with  the  government  are  capable  of  guaran- 
teeing the  concessions  given,  and  thus  of  establishing 
a  permanent  state  of  social  peace.2«    xhus,  the  revolu- 
tionists having  become  more  practical,  and  the  liberals 
more  democratic  and  more  advanced  in  their  demands, 
a  direct  agreement  between  the  two  groups  has  become 
possible. 

^  See  pp.  276  ff.  ^  See  pp.  293  ff- 


524  RUSSIA  AND  ITS  CRISIS 

In  December,  1904,  a  very  interesting  document 
setting  forth  this  agreement  was  published  in  a  num- 
ber of  newspapers.  It  is  a  "  declaration  "  founded  upon 
the  minutes  of  the  conference  held  at  Paris  by  the 
representatives  of  the  three  oppositionary  and  five  revo- 
lutionary organizations,  announcing  their  intention  of 
uniting  their  efforts  in  combined  action.  The  three 
oppositionary  parties  are  the  Finnish,  the  Russian,  and 
the  Polish  Constitutionalists.  The  revolutionary 
groups  are  chiefly  the  local  and  the  national  ones,  since 
the  cosmopolitan  Social  Democrats  declined  participa- 
tion in  any  co-ordinated  action  with  the  bourgeois, 
largely  for  the  reason  that  they  had  here  a  good  chance 
of  proving  that  their  rival  —  the  local  and  national 
socialistic  organizations  —  are  nothing  but  the  bour- 
geois in  disguise.  The  revolutionary  groups  present  at 
the  Paris  conference  were  the  Russian  Revolutionary 
Socialists,  the  Polish  Socialist  Party  (P.  P.  S.),  the 
Georgian  Revolutionary  Socialist  and  Federalist  Party, 
the  Armenian  Revolutionary  Federation,  and  —  as  an 
only  exception  —  the  Lettish  Social  Democratic  Labor 
Party.^'^  These  parties  mutually  agreed  that  the 
political  situation  in  Russia  is  so  serious,  and  the 
chances  for  political  reform  are  so  great,  that  an 
attempt  must  be  made  to  find  a  common  ground  for,  if 
not  "combined,"  at  least  "co-ordinated,"  action.  The 
result  of  their  discussions  is  formulated  in  their 
"  declaration,"  as  follows : 

None  of  the  parties  represented  at  the  meeting,  in  uniting  for 
concerted  action,  thinks  for  a  moment  of  abandoning  any  point  of 
its  particular  program,  or  of  the  tactical  methods  of  the  struggle, 

"  This  party,  however,  accepted  the  decisions  of  the  conference 
only  ad  referendum. 


THE  URGENCY  OF  REFORM  525 

which  are  adapted  to  the  necessities,  the  forces,  and  the  situation 
of  the  social  elements,  classes,  or  nationalities  whose  interests  it 
represents.  But,  at  the  same  time,  all  declare  that  the  principles 
expressed  below  are  recognized  by  all  of  them : 

1.  The  abolition  of  the  autocracy;  revocation  of  all  the 
measures  curtailing  the  constitutional  rights  of  Finland. 

2.  The  substitution  for  the  autocracy  of  a  democratic  regime 
based  on  universal  suffrage. 

3.  The  right  of  every  nationality  to  decide  for  itself;  free- 
dom of  the  national  development,  guaranteed  by  the  law ;  sup- 
pression of  all  violence  on  the  part  of  the  Russian  government, 
as  practiced  against  the  different  nationalities. 

In  the  name  of  these  fundamental  principles,  the  parties 
represented  at  the  conference  will  unite  their  efforts  in  order  to 
hasten  the  inevitable  fall  of  absolutism,  which  is  equally  incom- 
patible with  the  realization  of  all  the  ulterior  purposes  pursued 
by  each  of  the  parties. 

There  is  no  ambiguity  in  the  first  paragraph  of  this 
statement,  which  is  chiefly  negative.  The  suppression 
of  the  autocracy  is  thus  uni\-ersally  recognized  as  a 
common  aim  of  all  political  groups,  oppositionary  as 
well  as  revolutionary.  We  have  seen  that  a  long 
development  of  political  struggle  was  needed  to  reach 
this  unanimity.  In  the  same  paragraph  the  exceptional 
position  of  Finland  is  generally  recognized.  It  is  inter- 
esting to  note  that  the  real  initiative  of  the  Paris  con- 
ference belonged  to  "  a  few  members  of  the  Finnish 
opposition,"  which  heretofore  had  been  much  averse  to 
making  common  cause  with  the  Russian  revolution- 
aries. It  is  likewise  interesting  to  note  that  these  Fin- 
nish members  signed  in  the  name  of  the  ''  i'arty  of 
Active  Resistance."  which  name,  if  I  am  not  mistaken, 
appears  here  for  the  first  time,  thus  testifying  to  a  new- 
step  achieved  —  or  a  new  group  formed  —  by  the  Fin- 


526  RUSSIA  AND  ITS  CRISIS 

nish  opposition,  which  formerly  had  always  adhered  to 
the  methods  of  passive  resistance. 

The  second  paragraph  of  the  declaration  is  couched 
in  consciously  ambiguous  terms.  "A  democratic 
regime"  is  understood  as  a  constitutional  monarchy  by 
the  moderate  parties,  while  a  republic  is  the  only  regime 
consistent  with  the  socialistic  claims.  But  as  a  step 
toward  the  realization  of  their  own  program  they  may 
be  more  ready  to  admit,  as  a  matter  of  fact,  a  constitu- 
tional monarchy  than  to  accept,  even  temporarily,  a 
constitutional  formula.  Another  ambiguity  in  the 
second  paragraph  it  has  in  common  with  the  third. 
The  "  regime  "  is  evidently  understood  by  some  of  the 
Poles  as  meaning  that  of  political  independence  of  Rus- 
sia, while  the  rights  of  national  freedom  recognized  in 
the  third  paragraph  according  to  the  more  moderate 
view,  do  not  go  so  far  as  political  separation  from 
Russia.  But  for  the  great  mass  of  the  Polish  opposition 
the  idea  of  the  re-establishment  of  a  free  Poland  is  as 
necessary  as  is  the  idea  of  a  direct  democracy  for  the 
socialists ;  and  both  are  ready  to  make  such  concessions 
to  actual  conditions  as  they  would  not  admit  in  their 
theory  or  in  their  formal  declarations. 

Still  another  characteristic  feature  of  the  agree- 
ment is  that  it  does  not  mention  economic  reforms. 
This  does  not  mean,  of  course,  that  the  Russian  liberals 
are  opposed  to  economic  reforms;  on  the  contrary, 
their  party  published  a  declaration  (simultaneously 
with  the  agreement  just  quoted)  by  which  "  the  defense 
of  the  interests  of  the  working  masses  "  is  proclaimed 
to  form  one  of  the  integral  parts  of  their  program. 
The   Russian   "  intellectuals "   thus   remained  true  to 


THE  URGENCY  OF  REFORM  527 

their  tradition.  But  their  formula  is  at  variance  with 
that  of  the  sociaHsts.  which  is  ''  the  defense  of  the  inter- 
ests of  the  proletaries  by  the  proletaries."  The  "  intel- 
lectuals "  of  the  Osvohoshdaneya  may  be  classified  as 
"social  reformers;"  and  it  is  well  known  that  social 
reformers  are  violently  repudiated  by  the  revolutionary 
socialists  of  all  countries :  Germany,  France.  Italy, 
England.  And,  indeed,  harmonization  is  hardly  pos- 
sible between  a  program  that  tries  to  "sharpen"  and 
one  that  aims  to  "blunt"  the  social  contradictions. 
One  works  for  "social  peace,"  while  the  other  aims  at 
"  social  revolution ; "  one  is  rather  humanitarian,  while 
the  other  is  a  strictly  class  doctrine ;  one  is  "  opportun- 
ist" and  works  through  compromise,  while  the  other 
is  uncompromising  and  works  through  social  struggle. 
Competition  is  always  strongest  among  the  closest 
rivals;  that  is  perhaps  why  no  article  in  the  Osvo- 
hoshdaneya was  ever  more  strongly  denounced  by 
the  socialists  than  that  on  agrarian  reform,  which  not 
only  demanded  that  "  the  state  shall  contribute  toward 
the  passing  of  the  land  into  the  possession  of  the  work- 
ing masses,"  but  even  admitted,  as  one  of  the  possible 
means,  the  "  compulsory  expropriation "  of  land- 
owners.^^ 

Now,  under  these  conditions  it  would  evidently  l)e 
hopeless  to  discuss  a  common  platform  for  economic 
and  social  reform.  This  is  tacitly  admitted  by  the 
silence  on  the  subject  of  such  reform  of  the  document 
of  the  Paris  agreement.  So  long  as  political  reform 
remains  the  first  and  chief  reform  to  be  achieved,  it  is 
obviously  not  considered  necessary  to  discuss  matters 

''See  Osvobshdancya,  No.  g  (33),  and  The  Spark,  No.  54. 


528  RUSSIA  AND  ITS  CRISIS 

likely  to  bring  about  divergences  instead  of  "  co- 
ordinate action."  As  soon  as  that  political  reform  shall 
have  been  attained,  a  radical  change  of  party  lines  will 
take  place.  Very  likely  the  question  of  economic 
reforms  will  serve  as  one  of  the  reasons  for  such 
rearrangement.  Some  of  the  liberals  will  become 
bourgeois  or  "agrarians;"  others  will  remain  "intel- 
lectuals" and  "social  reformers;"  while  others  again 
may  join  the  socialists,  among  a  similar  differentiation 
between  the  more  moderate  and  the  more  radical  ele- 
ments will  be  caused  by  the  conditions  of  freer  political 
life.  But  until  this  political  freedom  comes,  they  all  — 
as  a  matter  of  fact  or  as  a  matter  of  formal  agreement 
—  will  make  common  front  against  the  common  enemy; 
and  their  unity  of  action  will  continue  to  increase  in 
the  future  as  it  has  been  increasing  in  the  past. 

The  "  declaration  "  of  the  oppositionary  and  revolu- 
tionary parties  certainly  marks  the  climax  of  the  politi- 
cal movement  in  Russia.  Its  practical  result  is  to 
isolate  the  government  in  its  struggle  with  the  Rus- 
sian opposition.  This,  indeed,  is  the  most  notable  feat- 
ure of  the  present  situation.  Let  us  see  what  are  the 
recent  facts  and  events  which  go  to  prove  this  assertion. 

The  members  of  the  Zemstvos,  taken  as  a  whole, 
are  not  at  all  identical  with  the  "  Emancipation  Party." 
Yet  so  powerful  is  the  present  current  of  liberal  public 
opinion  that  their  program,  recently  formulated  in  the 
petition  presented  to  the  Tsar,  is  that  of  the  "  Emanci- 
pation." We  have  seen  that  as  early  as  1902  voices 
were  heard  in  the  local  committees  advocating  the 
introduction  of  a  constitution.  But  these  voices  were 
indistinct,    and    such    as    had    a    more    positive    ring 


THE  URGENCY  OF  REFORM  529 

were  stifled,  and  their  possessors  sent  into  exile.  The 
cry  was,  however,  raised  again  —  this  time  not  by 
three  or  four  isolated  individuals,  but  by  fully  a  hun- 
dred; and  it  was  not  in  the  local  assemblies  legally 
summoned  in  the  districts,  but  in  a  semi-ofificial  meet- 
ing of  the  members  of  all  the  Zemstvos,  first  invited  by 
the  minister  Svyatopolk-AIirskee,  then  forbidden,  and 
finally  tolerated  to  meet  at  St.  Petersburg. 

This  was  the  first  meeting  in  Russian  history  which 
represented  the  Zemstvos  as  a  whole,  and  which  sum- 
marized the  opinion  of  the  Zemstvos,  not  about  local 
and  economic,  but  about  general  and  political  questions. 
This  meeting  formulated  a  demand  which  was  much 
more  positive  than  that  of  the  few  exiled  members  of 
1902.    In  its  petition  it  enumerated  all  the  fundamental 
rights  of  the  individual  and  the  citizen  :  the  inviolability 
of  the  person  and  of  the  private  home;    no  sentence 
without  trial,  and  no  diminution  of  rights  except  by 
judgment  of  an  independent  court ;  liberty  of  conscience 
and  of  belief ;  liberty  of  the  press  and  of  speech ;  equal 
rights  —  civil  and  political  —  for  all  social  orders,  and, 
as  a  consequence,  enfranchisement  of  the  peasants;   a 
large  measure  of  local  and  municipal  self-government ; 
and  last,  as  a  general  condition  and  a  guaranty  for  all 
the  preceding  rights,  "a  regular  representation  in  a 
separate  elective  body,  which  must  participate  in  legis- 
lation, in  working  out  the  budget,  and  in  controlling 
the   administration."      Of   the   ninety-eight   members 
present,   seventy-one  voted  for  this  last  clause  as  a 
whole,  while  the  minority  of  twenty-seven  was  satisfied 
with  its  first  half;  L  e.,  the  most  conservative  asked  for 


530  RUSSIA  AND  ITS  CRISIS 

a  "regular  representation  in  a  separate  elective  body, 
which  must  participate  in  legislation ; "  and  they  found 
this  reform  "absolutely  necessary  for  the  normal 
development  of  the  state  and  of  society."  In  the  last 
paragraph  of  their  petition  the  members  of  the  Zemst- 
vos  requested  that  the  anticipated  reform  be  carried  out 
with  the  assistance  of  the  "  freely  elected  representa- 
tives of  the  people;"  i.  e.,  demanded  the  convocation 
of  the  "constitutional  assembly." 

This  degree  of  unanimity  in  the  St.  Petersburg 
assembly  has  surpassed  the  boldest  expectations  even 
of  those  observers  who  have  closely  followed  the  latest 
events  in  the  political  life  of  Russia.  "  The  Petition  of 
Rights"  of  November  19-21,  1904,  will  remain  a 
beautiful  page  in  our  annals;  and  whatever  be  its 
immediate  practical  consequences,  its  political  impor- 
tance cannot  be  overestimated.  It  was  the  first  political 
program  of  the  Russian  Liberal  party,  openly  pro- 
claimed in  an  assembly  which  had  full  moral  right  to 
represent  liberalism  throughout  the  empire.  More- 
over, this  petition  of  the  Zemstvo  men  from  all  Russia 
was  officially  handed  to  the  Tsar,  and  a  deputation  of 
the  assembly  was  received  by  him.  The  pacification  of 
Russia  depended  at  that  moment  on  the  satisfactory 
answer  of  the  Tsar  to  the  petition.  This  answer 
seemed  to  have  been  more  or  less  determined  upon  in 
advance;  otherwise  there  would  have  been  no  political 
sense  in  permitting  the  assembly  to  gather  in  St. 
Petersburg,  and  in  receiving  the  petitioners  in  a  formal 
audience.  All  Russia  was  in  a  state  of  feverish  ex- 
pectation;  and  meanwhile  all  social  groups  —  writers 


THE  URGENCY  OF  REFORM  531 

and  journalists,  professors  and  men  of  science,  lawyers, 
engineers,  individual  Zemstvos,  provincial  circles  of 
intellectuals,  workingmen,  students,  learned  societies, 
the  general  public  in  the  street,  each  in  his  own  way, 
in  demonstrations,  banquets,  resolutions  covered  with 
thousands  of  signatures,  etc.,  etc. — hastened  to  indorse 
the  petition  of  the  Zemstvos.  No  more  united  and 
'*  co-ordinated  "  political  action  has  ever  been  witnessed 
in  the  history  of  the  country.  To  be  sure,  socialistic 
publications  drew  a  sharp  line  between  their  own 
demands  and  those  of  the  liberals,  and  tried  to  intro- 
duce workingmen  speakers  into  all  the  assemblies  of 
the  liberals,  proposing  to  include  in  their  resolutions 
a  more  positive  demand  for  a  "direct,  equal,  and 
secret"  general  vote,  freedom  of  strikes  and  a  constitu- 
tional convention,  as  well  as  for  the  immediate  cessa- 
tion of  the  war.  In  many  cases  these  demands  were 
agreed  to,  as  practically  they  did  not  contradict  —  and 
often  were  even  implied  in  —  the  demands  of  the  lib- 
erals themselves.  The  freedom  of  discussion  and  the 
boldness  of  speech  in  these  assemblies  surpassed  every- 
thing that  Russia  had  ever  before  seen ;  and  the  same 
spirit  pervaded  the  press.  Conservative  newspapers  — 
as  Novoya  Vraimya  —  became  liberal ;  liberal  news- 
papers became  radical ;  and  two  new  daily  papers  were 
started  in  St.  Petersburg  to  advocate  the  claims  of  the 
more  advanced  public  opinion.  Though  severely  cen- 
sored, they  used  a  bold,  open  language,  which,  with 
perhaps  two  exceptions  —  at  the  beginning  of  the  era 
of  the  "Great  Reforms"  (1859-61),  and  in  1881 — 
was  unprecedented  in  the  history  of  our  press.  Public 
manifestations  in  the  streets,  though  peaceful,   were 


532  RUSSIA  AND  ITS  CRISIS 

treated  with  relentless  cruelty.^^  Policemen  and 
"janitors"^"  in  groups  of  four  or  five  fell  upon  single 
unarmed  students  and  girls,  beat  them  with  their  fists, 
and  struck  them  with  drawn  swords,  until  the  poor 
disabled  victims  lost  consciousness.  Some  of  them 
died ;  others  were  maimed  for  life.  Evidently  this  was 
a  deliberate  and  systematized  attempt,  intended  to 
inspire  horror.  Instead,  it  only  inspired  hatred  and  a 
feeling  of  revenge. 

At  the  same  time  the  question  ot  reform  was  under 
discussion  in  the  Tsar's  palace,  Tsarskoya  Selo;  and 
in  a  cabinet  session  on  December  15,  under  the  presi- 
dency of  the  Tsar,  it  received  a  fatal  solution  which, 
instead  of  ending  the  conflict,  hopelessly  enlarged  the 
gulf  between  the  Tsar  and  his  people.  Mr.  Mooravyov, 
the  minister  of  justice,  who  was  the  first  to  speak, 
tried  to  prove  that  the  Tsar  had  no  right  to  change  the 
existing  political  order.  Mr.  Pobedonostsev  attempted 
to  prove  the  same  proposition  by  arguments  from  reli- 
gion. He  thought  —  in  his  own  peculiar  language  — 
that  Russia  "would  fall  into  sin  and  return  to  a  state 
of  barbarism,"  if  the  Tsar  should  renounce  his  power; 
religion  and  morality  would  suffer,  and  the  law  of  God 
would  be  violated.  It  was  such  arguments  as  these 
which  for  a  time  decided  the  fate  of  Russia.  Mr. 
Svyatopolk-Mirskee  tried  in  vain  to  prove  that  the 
minister  of  justice  talked  nonsense;  and  Mr.  Witte 
grimly  concluded :  "  If  it  should  become  known  that 
the  emperor  is  forbidden  by  law  and  religion  to  intro- 

"  See  p.  504,  footnote.  The  same  is  true  of  the  demonstrations  of 
December  18-19,  1904,  in  Moscow,  stifled  by  Mr.  Trepov  and  Grand 
Duke  Sergius. 

•'"  See  p.  194. 


THE  URGENCY  OF  REFORM  533 

duce  fundamental  reforms  of  his  own  will  —  well,  then 
a  part  of  the  population  will  come  to  the  conclusion 
that  these  reforms  must  be  achieved  by  w'ay  of  violence. 
It  would  be  equivalent  to  an  actual  appeal  to  revolu- 
tion !  "    Mr.  Witte  played  the  prophet.  •'' 

As  a  result  of  this  discussion,  the  manifesto  of 
December  26,  1904,  was  published.  It  began  with  the 
declaration  that  "  when  the  need  for  this  or  that  change 
shall  have  been  proved  ripe,  then  it  will  be  considered 
necessary  to  meet  it,  even  though  the  transformation  to 
which  this  change  may  lead  should  involve  the  intro- 
duction of  essentially  new  departures  in  legislation." 
The  meaning  of  that  solemn  declaration  was,  however, 
ludicrously  contradicted  and  narrowed  by  the  opposite 
affirmation  some  few  lines  previously:  "the  undevi- 
ating  maintenance  of  the  immutability  of  the  funda- 
mental laws  must  be  considered  as  an  established  prin- 
ciple of  government."  Such  innovations  as  would 
interfere  with  that  immutability  of  the  fundamental 
laws  were  deliberately  classified  —  and  in  advance  —  by 
the  manifesto  as  "  tendencies  not  seldom  mistaken,  and 
often  influenced  by  transitory  circumstances."  These 
introductory  principles  were  enough  to  annihilate  any 
further  concessions  in  the  manifesto.  All  the  demands 
of  the  Zemstvos,  except  political  reform,  were  men- 
tioned in  the  manifesto,  but  the  promised  changes  were 
stated    in    such    evasive    and    ambiguous    terms    and 

^'  According  to  other  reports,  however,  Mr.  Witte  advocated  the 
theory  of  a  "  Democratic  autocracy ;  "  i.  e.,  he  was  of  the  opinion  that 
concessions  to  the  lower  classes  —  peasants  and  workinpmen  — 
would  save  the  autocracy  from  the  political  demands  of  the  liberals. 
Both  versions  may  he  true,  thus  characterizing  the  political  role 
played  by  Mr.  Witte  in  these  days  of  crisis. 


534  RUSSIA  AND  ITS  CRISIS 

accompanied  with  so  many  "limitations,"  "possi- 
bilities," and  other  restrictions,  that  the  impression 
produced  was  just  opposite  to  what  had  been  expected. 
The  immediate  measures  of  the  government  still 
further  increased  the  contrast  between  promises  and 
good  intentions,  and  the  dire  reality.  While  the  mani- 
festo promised  to  reconsider  the  "  temporary  "  and  ex- 
ceptional regulations  taken  in  its  self-defense,  as  a  mat- 
ter of  fact  the  government  found  itself  obliged  to  resort 
to  enforced  measures  of  repression,  domiciliary 
searches,  arrests,  imprisonments,  etc.  While  it  was 
promising  to  stop  arbitrariness  and  to  enforce  a  regime 
of  "  legality,"  in  Nishnee  Novgorod  a  crowd  of  police- 
men made  a  raid  on  a  local  club  and  treated  the  mem- 
bers of  a  party  which  they  found  in  the  clubroom  just 
as  they  did  the  political  demonstrators  in  the  streets: 
they  struck  them  with  drawn  swords  —  and  the  feat 
remained  unpunished.  The  manifesto  promised  to  free 
the  press  from  "excessive"  repression;  and  there  was 
a  shower  of  repressive  measures  against  the  press :  in 
three  weeks  of  December  there  were  doled  out  seven 
warnings,  two  prohibitions  of  retail  sale,  one  "severe 
reproof,"  and  two  periodicals  were  stopped  for  three 
months.  The  manifesto  answered,  and  tried  to  com- 
ply with,  a  political  demand  by  the  men  of  the  Zemst- 
vos ;  and  at  the  same  time  an  order  was  issued  that  no 
political  demands  should  be  permitted  to  be  discussed 
in  the  Zemstvos.  The  Tsar  promised  to  make  more 
effective  his  promises  of  religious  freedom  given  in  an 
earlier  manifesto  of  1903;  and  at  the  same  time  the 
Holy  Synod,  led  by  Mr.  Pobedonostsev,  made  public 
an  address  to  the  clergy  which  sounded  very  much  like 


THE  URGENCY  OF  REFORM  535 

a  disavowal  of  the  Tsar  and  invited  the  priests  to  pray 
God  to  give  the  Tsar  more  power  and  wisdom. 

In  short,  it  was  not  pacification,  but  increasing  irri- 
tation, that  ensued  from  the  publication  of  the  mani- 
festo. Its  only  positive  result  was  to  state  that  there 
were  good  reasons  for  the  complaints  and  demands  of 
public  opinion,  and  at  the  same  time  to  show  that  con- 
cessions formerly  had  been  withheld  by  the  govern- 
ment, not  in  consequence  of  any  systematic  plan  of  wise 
statesmanship,  but  simply  because  there  was  no  urgency 
in  the  demand  for  reform.  Evidently,  the  onus  pro- 
handi  now  rested  upon  public  opinion.  Public  opinion 
had  to  show  that  the  need  for  this  or  that  change  was 
"  ripe,"  in  order  that  the  government  should  "  consider 
it  necessary  to  meet  it."  Instead  of  diminishing,  the 
tension  thus  further  increased. 

An  outbreak  must  come.  It  was  openly  spoken  of 
in  private  and  in  public,  with  apprehension  by  some, 
anticipated  by  many,  foretold  by  all.  Quotations  from 
the  time  of  the  great  French  Revolution  were  on  e\-ery- 
body's  lips.  Prince  Troubetskoy,  the  Moscow  marshal 
of  nobility,  informed  the  Tsar,  in  a  classical  expression, 
that  what  he  saw  in  Moscow  was  "no  more  a  revolt,  it 
was  a  revolution"  ("ce  n'etait  plus  une  emeute,  mais 
une  revolution")  ;  and  the  grand  duke  Vladeemir,  in 
an  interview  with  an  American  journalist,  quoted 
Napoleon  —  I  guess  it  was  another  classical  phrase: 
"II  faut  mitrailler  cette  canaille." 

Now,  as  it  often  happens,  the  apprehension  has 
helped  to  conjure  up  the  danger  apprehended.  On 
January  22,  1905,  the  St.  Petersburg  authorities,  nerv- 
ous as  they  were,  repeated  on  a  larger  scale,  in  the 


536  RUSSIA  AND  ITS  CRISIS 

clearness  of  a  sunny  day,  what  Admiral  Roshdestven- 
skee  did  in  the  darkness  of  night  to  the  Hull  fishermen. 
They  fired  on  an  unarmed  crowd  of  workingmen  who 
tried  to  see  the  Tsar  in  his  Winter  Palace  in  order  per- 
sonally to  present  a  petition  asking  for  the  amelioration 
of  their  lot.  To  complete  the  parallel,  the  authorities 
attempted  to  justify  their  fear  by  semiofficial  allega- 
tions—  laid  at  the  door  of  the  grand  duke  Sergius  by 
the  European  and  American  press  —  that  the  St. 
Petersburg  disturbances  were  brought  about  by  Eng- 
lish and  Japanese  money. 

The  idea  of  presenting  a  petition  to  the  Tsar  was 
anything  but  revolutionary.  It  was  rather  traditional ; 
and  though  there  have  been  in  our  history  instances  of 
meeting  the  demands  of  the  people  as  they  were  met 
on  January  22  (the  Tsar  Alexis,  for  example,  in  the 
seventeenth  century  made  his  soldiers  slaughter  the 
crowd  that  came  to  his  palace  in  Kolomenskoya),  there 
have  also  been  instances  of  a  different  reception.  A 
quarter  of  a  century  ago  (1878)  a  deputation  of  work- 
ingmen was  quietly  received  in  the  Anichkov  Palace 
by  the  then  heir-apparent  (Alexander  III.).  This 
time  the  petitioners  had  even  better  reason  to  believe 
that  the  Tsar  w^ould  listen  to  them,  as  the  initiative 
belonged  to  the  "  Society  of  St.  Petersburg  Working- 
men,"  organized  a  year  ago  by  the  government  itself, 
in  order  to  form  a  government  party  among  the  work- 
ingmen and  oppose  it  to  the  revolutionary  organizations 
of  the  socialists.  Father  George  Gopon  —  the  first  hero 
of  the  Russian  revolution  —  w^as  the  president  of  this 
society,  started  under  the  benediction  of  the  same  arch- 
bishop of  St.  Petersburg,  Antonius,  who  excommuni- 


THE  URGENCY  OF  REFORM  537 

cated  him  on  the  "  red  Sunday."  And  the  whole  aspect 
of  the  procession,  with  the  "ikons"  and  crosses,  with  the 
portrait  of  the  Tsar  home  by  a  priest  in  full  vestments, 
had  nothing  in  common  with  the  red  banners  and  the 
"  Marseillaise  "  of  the  socialistic  demonstrations. 

Yet  the  crowd  of  January  22  was  doubtless  revolu- 
tionary. Such  was  the  general  tension  that  in  less  than 
a  week  of  preparation  the  movement  from  purely  trade- 
unionistic  had  really  become  political.-  The  police 
watched  the  developments;  but,  instead  of  preventing 
the  movement,  they  chose  to  give  the  plain  people  a 
bloody  lesson  —  ///  anima  vUi  —  just  as  they  had  given 
it  to  the  students  of  St.  Petersburg  and  Moscow  on 
December  11  and  18-19. 

The  trade-unionist  origin  of  the  movement  is  closely 
connected  with  the  evolution  of  the  "  Society  of  St. 
Petersburg  Workingmen,"  protected  by  the  police.  At 
a  certain  juncture  the  police  became  aware  that  the 
workingmen  of  the  society  took  too  seriously  the 
promises  of  the  government.  The  society  was  widely 
extended,  and  had  eleven  branches  in  St.  Petersburg; 
it  felt  itself  strong  by  its  own  power,  and  became 
aggressive  in  its  dealings  with  the  employers.  Then 
the  police  withdrew  their  protection  from  the  "  inde- 
pendent"  workingmen,  and  the  manufacturers,  having 
met  in  December,  decided  to  dismiss  the  "  union  men  " 
from  their  factories.  This  served  as  a  signal,  and  the 
first  demands  —  purely  unionistic  —  were  formulated 
by  the  society  as  early  as  January  15.  But  the  very 
next  day  Social  Democratic  speakers  appeared  at  the 
workingmen's  meetings,  and  the  movement  very  soon 
reached   its   second   stage,    in   which,   the  professional 


538  RUSSIA  AND  ITS  CRISIS 

demands  of  the  union  was  exchanged  for  the  minimum 
program  of  the  Social  Democracy.  The  third  stage 
immediately  followed,  in  which  the  socialistic  demands 
were  supplemented  by  the  political  demands  which 
were  just  then  being  put  forth  by  all  classes  of  society, 
and  were  willingly  indorsed  by  Father  Gopon  —  "the 
Russian  Lassalle."  In  a  few  days  all  industrial  St. 
Petersburg  was  on  a  strike.  In  a  few  days  more  a 
political  strike  had  spread  to  every  part  of  Russia,  and 
became  particularly  acute  in  the  Polish  provinces  and 
in  the  Caucasus.  There  were  many  people  in  Russia 
during  these  days  who  seriously  believed  that  a  civil 
war  had  begun. 

But  the  fear,  as  well  as  the  hope,  proved  exagger- 
ated. It  was,  indeed,  the  greatest  political  outbreak 
Russia  had  ever  seen.  Hundreds  of  victims  fell  dead, 
and  thousands  were  wounded.  The  movement  was, 
however,  stifled  in  blood.  Comparative  and  temporary 
quiet  had  been  re-established.  But  it  was  evident  to 
everybody  that  for  the  Russian  government  it  was  a 
Pyrrhus  victory.  Its  moral  authority  had  been 
drowned  in  the  blood  of  the  wretched  victims  of  Janu- 
ary 22.  Educated  Russian  society,  in  its  public  gather- 
ings and  assemblies,  by  silently  arising  paid  homage  to 
the  memory  of  its  martyrs,  as  it  had  done  in  honor  of 
Mr.  Sazonov,  the  "executioner"  of  Mr.  Plehve.  Far 
from  having  ceased,  the  struggle  is  sure  to  become 
more  virulent.  Nothing  short  of  speedy  concessions  — 
much  more  extensive  and  much  more  deliberate  than 
those  of  the  manifesto  of  December  26  —  is  likely  to 
prevent  further  disasters.  Facing  that  urgent  need, 
what  is  the  position  of  the  government? 


THE  URGENCY  OF  REFORM  539 

Unhappily,  it  is  as  uncertain  and  vacillating  as  ever. 
Possessing  no  program  of  their  own,  the  authorities  are 
trailing  in  the  rear  of  public  opinion ;  and  when  they 
finally  decide  to  grant  some  unimportant  concession,  it 
is  always  too  late,  and  the  public  demands  are  far 
ahead. 

And,  indeed,  how  can  they  have  any  program  for 
important  reforms,  as  long  as  they  are  handicapped  by 
their  theory  of  national  immutability?  We  know  how 
inefficient  and  rudimentar);  that  theory  of  "official 
nationalism  "  was  at  its  first  appeararkce.  Some  seventy 
years  ago  it  was  derived  from  Slavophilism  by  depriv- 
ing the  latter  of  any  deeper  sense  and  any  liberal  inter- 
pretation. The  present  epigoni  of  "official  national- 
ism "  do  not  even  keep  up  to  the  level  of  this  simplified 
and  distorted  nationalistic  theory.  The  theory  of 
"official  nationalism"  had  to  justify  the  system  of 
"self-defense"  of  the  autocracy  w^hich  had  been 
deliberately  applied  since  that  time.^^  But  then  the 
policy  of  "self-defense"  itself  became  a  tradition,  and 
its  theoretical  justification  somehow  seemed  no  more 
necessary.  It  was  now  an  axiom,  and  its  wisdom  was 
admitted,  not  upon  arguments  discussed,  but  upon  some 
precedents  quoted.  An  "  example  "  set  by  a  "  prede- 
cessor "  was  always  at  hand  to  take  the  place  of  any 
sociological,  political,  or  even  strictly  practical  reason. 
The  only  semblance  of  theoretical  argumentation  was 
that  displayed  by  Mr.  Pobedonostse^^•'•^  and  we  have 
seen  that  that  was  merely  negative.  The  mere  holding 
in  check  and  destruction  of  everything  new  and  fresh, 
the  mere  "  freezing  out "  of  everything  that  was  alive 

'•''  See  p  p. 1 80-82.  '^  See  pp.  61,  62. 


540  RUSSIA  AND  ITS  CRISIS 

—  that  for  the  last  forty  years  has  been  the  only  doc- 
trine of  the  state.  It  may  fairly  be  called  "govern- 
ment nihilism."  The  supreme  stolidity  of  such  a  con- 
ception was  equaled  only  by  its  serene  self-reliance. 
The  "  fatherly "'  power  of  the  state  stubbornly  persisted 
in  treating  its  "subjects"  as  children  or  minors.  It 
claimed  to  be  alone  in  the  possession  of  science,  of 
statesmanship,  and  of  a  superior  wisdom  inaccessible 
to  the  "  limited  understanding  of  the  subjects." 

Naturally  enough,  when  it  met  with  certain 
demands  on  the  part  of  public  opinion,  it  did  not  think 
of  treating  them  seriously.  Instead,  it  alternately  tried 
ineffective  persecution  and  unsatisfactory  concessions. 
The  only  possible  peaceful  solution  —  to  rule  zvith  pub- 
lic opinion,  and  not  against  it  —  was  never  tried. 
Accordingly,  there  was  neither  system  nor  sincerity  in 
the  concessions,  because  only  such  were  granted  as 
could  be  wrung  by  force  from  the  government,  and 
then  only  to  those  who  could  force  them,  and  not  until 
they  could.  As  soon  as  there  was  nobody  there  to 
watch  them,  they  were  gradually  withdrawn.  Such  is 
the  whole  story  of  the  "great  reforms"  granted  by 
Alexander  II.  Such  is  also  the  story  of  our  factory 
legislation.  The  laws  of  1882-86,  1897,  and  1903 
were  all  passed  after  large  strikes  and  disturbances  had 
occurred,  and  then  explained  away  by  subsequent 
"instructions"  when  the  difficulty  was  over.  During 
the  last  few  years,  when  public  dissatisfaction  became 
particularly  acute,  a  systematic  policy  of  falsifying 
public  opinion  was  resorted  to.  There  were  mass  meet- 
ings to  congratulate  the  government  and  to  thank  it  for 
the  paternal  care  it  bestowed  on  its  "  subjects  "  —  such, 


THE  URGENCY  OF  REFORM  541 

for  instance,  as  that  of  March  4,  1902,  organized  by  the 
Moscow  poHce  for  Grand  Duke  Sergius.  There  were 
"trade  unions"  started  by  the  gendarmes  and  spies, 
protected  by  the  poHce,  and  winning  a  strike  here  and 
there ;  while  regular  strikes  remained  forbidden  by  law 
and  were  severely  punished.  There  were  deputations 
of  workingmen  to  the  Tsar,  organized  by  the  police  and 
repudiated  by  their  supposed  constituents.  There  were, 
side  by  side  with  these  "independent"  workingmen, 
some  "free-acting"  students,  organized  and  protected 
by  the  authorities.  There  w^ere  even  some  attempts  to 
organize  a  government  party  in  the  Zemstvos.  Gov- 
ernment protection  w^as  given  to  certain  "  Russian " 
societies  and  assemblies  formed  in  various  cities,  com- 
posed of  government  officials  and  people  dependent  on 
government  favors,  to  make  a  show  of  nationalism  and 
jingoistic  patriotism,  to  speak  in  the  name  of  Russian 
educated  society,  and  so  to  represent  Russian  public 
opinion.  There  is  in  Russia  a  special  name  to  designate 
all  these  governmental  attempts  to  falsify  public  opin- 
ion. They  are  called  "the  work  of  Mr.  Zoobatov"  — 
Zoobatovcheena  —  from  the  name  of  an  ingenious 
detective  who  inaugurated  the  system  upon  the  advice 
of  a  renegade  from  the  revolutionary  People's  Will 
Party,  Mr.  Leo  Tikhomeerov. 

But  all  these  and  like  attempts  proved  miserable 
failures.  Instead  of  helping  the  government  out  of  its 
difificulties,  they  only  increased  its  embarrassments. 
This  was  particularly  the  case  with  the  sham  "  trade 
unions,"  which  awakened  class  consciousness  among 
such  workingmen  as  the  socialists  had  not  yet  been  able 
to  reach  with  their  propaganda,  and  thus  served  to  pro- 


542  RUSSIA  AND  ITS  CRISIS 

mote  the  cause  of  the  latter.     Far  from  fooHng  any- 
body, the  government  was  only  fooling  itself. 

But  there  was  another  danger  for  the  government 
beside  that  of  being  lulled  into  the  illusion  of  making 
internal  peace,  while  actually  it  was  breeding  increased 
dissatisfaction.  A  much  greater  danger  inherent  in 
that  policy  of  deceit  arose  from  the  fact  that  all  faith  in 
the  sincerity  of  the  government  was  gradually  disappear- 
ing; so  that  when  the  time  came  for  making  real  con- 
cessions, nobody  could  rely  upon  the  sincerity  of  the 
promises.  The  imperial  manifestoes,  like  those  of 
March  ii,  1903,  and  December  25,  1904,  only  con- 
tributed to  this  general  skepticism.  As  a  result,  now 
even  the  moderate  elements  of  public  opinion  are  ready 
to  unite  with  the  more  radical  in  their  demand  that 
the  work  of  the  coming  reforms  shall  be  done  —  not 
by  the  government  boards ;  not  even  by  such  institu- 
tions as  the  Council  of  Ministers,  which  has  always 
been  a  weapon  in  the  hands  of  the  reactionaries ;  not  by 
the  Council  of  State,  which  is  a  body  of  officials  mostly 
relegated  there  from  the  higher  offices  on  account  of 
senility,  incapacity,  or  a  too  reactionary  disposition^'* — 
but  by  the  freely  elected  representatives  of  the  people, 
in  a  special  constitutional  convention.  This  is  also  the 
only  way  of  bringing  new  men  into  politics.  The  pres- 
ent composition  of  our  official  class  is  exceedingly 
unsatisfactory,  owing  to  that  system  of  eliminating  the 
talented  and  the  independent,  and  of  promoting  the 

"  The  former  scheme  is  now  used  by  the  government ;  the  latter 
was  recently  proposed  by  the  marshals  of  nobility,  who,  however, 
wished  the  Council  of  State  to  be  completed  by  representatives  of  the 
existing  self-governing  bodies.  Both  schemes  are  unable  to  satisfy 
public  opinion. 


THE  URGENCY  OF  REFORM  543 

obsequious  and  the  "trimmers,"  which  is  just  the 
reverse  of  "natural  selection/'  and  results  in  breeding 
incapacity  and  dishonesty  as  the  most  fitting  qualities 
for  the  civil  service. 

The  necessity  of  a  radical  change  in  the  methods 
of  administration  cannot  but  be  painfully  felt  by  the 
government  itself.  After  the  ministry  of  deceit  and 
violence  of  Mr.  Plehve  followed  the  ministry  of 
"  benevolent  autocracy  "  of  Prince  Svyatopolk-Mirskee. 
The  program  of  the  latter,  however,  proved  even  more 
impossible  than  the  former.  The  saddest  thing  is  that 
the  government  does  not  seem  to  have  learned  by 
experience,  and  is  now  again  going  to  try  deceit  and 
violence.  The  scheme  of  summoning  a  Zemskcc  Sobov 
will  certainly  be  understood  as  a  further  piece  of  deceit 
by  the  irritated  society,  unless  it  be  done  on  the  lines 
demanded  by  all.  But,  then,  there  is  no  use  of  calling 
the  future  assembly  a  Zemskcc  Sobor^^ — a  term  gener- 

^  It  was  generally  expected  that  on  March  4,  1905,  the  anniver- 
sary of  the  liberation  of  the  peasants,  a  promise  to  summon  the 
Zemskee  Sobor  would  be  made  public.  On  the  morning  of  this  com- 
memoration day,  however,  instead  of  the  expected  promise  appeared 
a  manifesto  of  another  sort,  couched  in  terms  implying  political 
notions  generally  known  as  those  of  M.  Pobedonostsev.  In  this 
manifesto  the  "  ill-intentioned  leaders  of  the  seditious  movement  " 
were  severely  censured  for  their  "  audacious  assaults  upon  the 
foundations  of  the  Russian  state — foundations  sanctioned  by  the 
Orthodox  church  and  by  law."  Further,  these  leaders  were  charged 
with  "  intending  to  destroy  the  existing  political  order  and  of  sub- 
stituting a  new  rule  uncongenial  to  our  country."  "  All  Russians  who 
held  sacred  the  obligations  of  our  national  antiquity "  (a  class  of 
whom  there  are  extremely  few)  were  invited  to  unite  in  defense  of 
the  throne.  Soon,  however,  it  transpired  that  this  manifesto  was  as 
great  a  surprise  to  the  ministers  as  the  manifesto  of  1881  had  been  to 
Loris  Melikov,  although  this  time  the  reactionary  advisers  of  the 
Tsar  failed  to  outwit  the  ministry.     .\  stormy  meeting  followed,  held 


544  RUSSIA  AND  ITS  CRISIS 

ally  discredited  as  implying  a  certain  amount  of  politi- 
cal sham. 

And  as  to  violence  —  it  has  never  stopped.  The 
nomination  of  Mr.  Trepov  and  Mr.  Booleeghin,  to 
succeed  Prince  Svyatopolk-Mirskee,  can  but  be  taken 
as  a  threat  of  violence  and  a  provocation.  Everybody 
knows  that  these  men  belong  to  the  same  set  as  the  late 
Mr.  Bogoleppov,  minister  of  public  instruction,  and 
Mr.  Zvairev,  recently  dismissed  from  the  post  of  chief 
censor.  They  all  received  their  preparatory  training 
in  politics  at  Moscow,  under  the  auspices  of  Grand 

in  presence  of  the  Tsar.  The  minister  of  justice  —  the  guardian  of 
official  legality  —  threatened  to  resign  if  the  manifesto  were  not 
immediately  withdrawn.  As  a  result,  another  rescript  to  a  quite 
opposite  effect  was  published  on  the  evening  of  the  same  day.  In 
this  document  the  latest  petitioners  —  virtually  the  same  persons  as 
the  "ill-intentioned  leaders  of  the  seditious  movement"  —  were  now 
thanked  for  their  loyal  feelings  on  the  occasion  of  their  congratula- 
tions on  the  birth  of  the  heir-apparent ;  and  their  demands  for 
political  representation  were  in  a  vague  way  brought  into  connection 
with  the  wise  examples  of  the  royal  "  predecessors  "  who  gradually 
yielded  to  the  "  ripe  "  necessity  of  reform.  The  "  rescript,"  though 
it  urged  the  difficulty  of  carrying  out  the  reform  under  the  condition 
of  preserving  unshaken  the  fundamental  laws,  finally  gave  the  craved 
for  promise :  henceforward,  with  God's  help,  to  admit  the  most 
deserving  ones,  those  invested  with  the  confidence  of  the  people, 
their  elected  representatives,  to  share  in  the  preparation  and  discus- 
sion of  the  drafts  of  laws.  Of  course,  such  a  promise,  coming  imme- 
diately after  the  solemn  declaration  of  that  most  obsolete  of  formulas, 
lost  nearly  all  its  effectiveness.  Through  its  obscure  terms  and 
straggling,  confused  definitions,  however,  one  thing  was  clearly  to  be 
perceived :  autocracy  is  to  be  preserved  at  any  cost,  and  the  role 
of  the  representative  assembly  is  to  be  the  same  as  in  that  one 
planned  by  Loris  Melikov.  The  fact  that  the  writers  forbore  to  use 
the  term  Zemskee  Sobor,  implies,  under  the  circumstances,  not  an 
increase  of  rights  for  the  coming  assembly,  but  rather  their  diminu- 
tion. A  study  of  the  "  rescript "  shows  that  no  time  for  convoking 
the    assembly    was    set,    no    definite    scheme    for   the    franchise    was 


THE  URGENCY  OF  REFORM  545 

Duke  Sergius.^^  It  is  also  known  that  the  policy  of  the 
latter  is  that  of  unswerving  reaction.  The  sum  of 
statesmanship  for  him  is  condensed  in  the  advice  "to 
be  firm." 

What  does  this  advice  really  mean?  Has  not 
experience  abundantly  proved  that  to  be  "firm,"  in  the 
sense  in  which  the  grand  duke  employs  the  phrase,  is, 
not  to  be  "strong,"  but  to  be  blind  and  deaf;  that  it  is 
to  try  to  resist  an  avalanche  with  two  bare  hands? 
Beating  drums  in  order  to  prevent  the  eclipse  of  the 
sun  is  a  much  wiser  policy  than  this ;  because  beating 
drums  does  not  harm  anybody,  whereas  standing  "firm" 
against  an  avalanche  means  provoking  a  catastrophe. 

History  has  known  few  examples  of  such  voluntary 
blindness.  The  civilized  world  looks  with  amazement  and 
horror  at  the  sad  spectacle  presented  by  Russia,  and  can- 
not comprehend  how  it  is  possible  that  people  do  not  see 
what  is  so  self-evident  to  all  outsiders.  How  can  any- 
one, unless  he  be  a  lunatic,  persevere  in  so  dangerous  a 
game,  and  one  which  he  has  so  little  hope  of  winning? 

To  be  sure,  the  persons  responsible  for  that  spec- 
tacle are  not  suffering  from  any  mental  disease.  But 
they  are,  nevertheless,  monomaniacs.  They  are  the 
iitopists  of  autocracy. 

mentioned,  and  that  previous  to  putting  the  promised  assembly  into 
operation,  the  whole  proposition  —  even  as  to  its  possibility  —  is  to 
be  discussed  by  a  special  committee  under  the  presidency  of  the 
minister  of  the  interior,  Mr.  Booleeghin,  an  official  of  the  late  Grand 
Duke  Sergius.  Under  these  circumstances  it  will  be  clearly  seen 
how  illusory  the  promise  must  be  ;  and  the  fact  of  its  being  set  forth 
in  such  a  form  as  this  merely  adds  one  to  the  long  series  of  political 
mistakes  already  mentioned  in  this  text. 

3«  When  the  manuscript  was  in  the  hands  of  the  printer  the 
telegraph  brought  news  of  the  assassination  of  Grand  Duke  Sergius. 


CHAPTER   VIII 

CONCLUSION 

The  reader  who  has  come  as  far  as  this  may  feel 
that  the  multitude  of  details  in  this  book  is  so  great 
that  at  times  he  has  nearly  or  quite  lost  his  way ;  or,  at 
least,  that  the  cogency  and  effectiveness  brought  to  the 
conclusion  of  the  argument  by  this  mass  of  detail  have 
been  partly  lost  by  a  dissipation  of  attention.  It  may 
now,  therefore,  be  well  to  leave  a  clue  —  to  summarize 
the  most  important  points,  and  to  indicate  the  essential 
relation  existing  betwen  the  different  parts  of  the  book. 

We  began  with  the  obvious  consideration  that  in 
every  aspect  of  her  life  Russia  is  in  process  of  change. 
To  this  observation  we  added  that  she  changes  very 
rapidly;  that  in  some  respects,  indeed,  she  cedes  prior- 
ity in  this  matter  only  to  the  United  States.  We  then 
glanced  at  Russia's  past  history,  and  saw  that  she  has 
ever  been  changing;  in  fact,  we  might  have  added,  as 
the  result  of  a  deeper  historical  study,  that  in  Russian 
history  there  is  no  single  half-century  just  like  the  one 
succeeding  or  the  one  preceding,  and  that  always  the 
changes  have  been  quite  essential. 

Just  here,  however,  we  met  the  opposite  assertion  : 
that  Russia,  at  least  in  certain  aspects  of  her  life,  has 
never  changed.  We  reviewed  the  history  of  this  asser- 
tion, proffered  by  our  nationalists,  and  came  to  the 
conclusion  that  this  theory  of  the  immutability  of  Rus- 
sia is  itself  a  product  of  change;  that  even  as  a  theory 
this  idea  had  no  existence  until  a  certain,  quite  recent, 

546 


CONCLUSION  547 

time ;  and  that,  when  it  appeared,  it  was  not  the  result 
of  a  deep  scientific  study  of  Russia's  past,  but  rather  the 
joint  product  of  a  romantic  theory  of  nationality  and 
the  practical  need  of  the  present  government  for  self- 
defense.  Now,  of  course,  such  an  origin  does  not  say 
much  in  favor  of  the  theory  of  the  immutability  of 
Russia.  And  the  theory  will  appear  to  us  still  more 
objectionable  if  we  consider  that,  in  the  view  of  some 
of  its  adherents,  the  only  result  of  this  presumed  immu- 
tability is  an  extreme  adaptability  of  the  national  type, 
and  its  aptness  to  be  influenced  by  other  national  types. 
We  did  not  decline  to  adopt  this  latter  view,  as  far  as  it 
was  founded  on  a  true  observation;  and  we  found  it 
fully  supported  by  other,  particularly  by  foreign, 
writers,  who  spoke  from  an  entirely  different  point  of 
view.  We  thus  acknowledged  the  plasticity  of  the 
Russian  type  to  be  a  real  national  trait;  but,  far  from 
seeing  in  it  anything  inherent  and  essential  to  the 
national  type,  we  recognized  in  it  only  a  characteristic 
of  an  early  stage  of  culture  and  of  an  incomplete  social 
development. 

Not  satisfied,  however,  with  this  ostensible  refuta- 
tion of  the  theory  of  national  immutability,  we  under- 
took to  follow  the  historical  arguments  for  this  theory. 
And  here  again  we  had  to  put  the  same  question,  which 
this  theory  tries  to  answer  in  a  positive  way :  Is  the 
Russian  historical  tradition  unchangeable?  Is  it  even 
as  firm  and  solid  as  the  tradition  of  other  countries 
which  never  claimed  immutability?  Then  we  recon- 
sidered the  case  in  the  light  of  both  the  religious  and 
the  political  tradition  in  Russia.  So  far  as  the  religious 
tradition  is  concerned,  the  nationalistic  theory  laid  par- 


548  RUSSIA  AND  ITS  CRISIS 

ticular  stress  on  the  immutability  of  Orthodoxy,  as  the 
chief  foundation  of  the  Russian  national  type;  and  as 
to  the  political  tradition,  autocracy  was  referred  to  as 
an  immutable  political  form,  likewise  characteristic  of 
the  national  type.  In  order  to  find  the  proofs  for  or 
against  the  thesis  of  immutability,  we  reviewed  the 
history  of  Russian  Orthodoxy,  as  well  as  that  of  autoc- 
racy; and  we  found  always  that  the  facts  disprove  the 
thesis. 

In  the  matter  of  the  religious  tradition,  it  appeared 
that  Russian  Orthodoxy  was  rather  a  product  than  a 
factor  of  the  national  life.  We  saw  that  in  Russian 
history  a  certain  time  had  passed  before  this  product 
appeared;  and  that  there  was  another  time  when  it 
ceased  to  be  characteristic  of  the  religious  life.  And 
while  trying  to  explain  why  it  was  so,  we  found  that 
the  period  in  which  Russian  Orthodoxy,  as  a  particu- 
lar type,  had  no  existence,  occurred  when  the  religious 
life  was  of  an  exceedingly  low  type  —  something  like 
Shintoism  in  Japan  —  and  when  Christianity  remained 
under  the  tutelage  of  the  Greek  missionaries  who  intro- 
duced it  into  Russia.  Then  we  saw  that  the  period  in 
which  Orthodoxy  was  no  longer  characteristic  of  the 
popular  belief  was  when  religious  thought,  becoming 
more  advanced,  could  not  be  satisfied  by  the  old  type 
of  faith.  The  new  types  of  faith  we  found  to  be,  in 
their  essence,  the  same  as  in  western  Europe ;  or,  as  we 
called  it,  the  evangelical  and  the  spiritual  Christianity. 
And  what  prevented  the  new  religious  movement  from 
its  timely  spread  was  shown  to  be  only  restrictive 
measures  and  a  system  of  religious  persecution. 

Orthodoxy,  then,  we  found  to  be  the  national  type 


CONCLUSION  549 

of  religion,  formed  in  the  intermediate  period  of  Rus- 
sia's religious  history,  when  religious  thought  was 
somewhere  between  its  ebb  and  its  flood.  When  this 
national  type  of  religion  was  soon  found  by  the  govern- 
ment itself  not  to  be  upon  the  same  level  with  the  Greek 
tradition  we  saw  that  the  authorities  repudiated  this 
production  of  the  national  creative  genius  as  being  too 
national.  And  ever  since  that  time  the  religious  life  of 
the  established  church  has  been  entirely  paralyzed. 
Without  a  spark  of  life  in  its  head  or  in  any  of  its 
members,  the  church  became  secularized,  and  so  was 
transformed  into  an  institution  of  the  state.  What, 
then,  could  we  conclude  as  to  the  firmness  and  solidity 
of  the  Russian  religious  tradition? 

Necessarily  we  found  that  there  was  no  such  tradi- 
tion as  was  able  to  stand  by  itself;  that  the  living 
thread  of  tradition  had  been  cut  ojff  by  the  authorities  as 
early  as  the  seventeenth  century;  and  that  the  formal 
tradition  is  at  present  forcibly  upheld,  while  a  new  liv- 
ing one  is  as  forcibly  prevented  from  forming.  And 
yet  this  new  and  persecuted  tradition  appears  firm  and 
solid  in  comparison  with  the  old  and  formal  one,  which 
stands  in  dire  need  of  the  support  of  the  state. 

Then,  proceeding  to  study  the  Russian  political 
tradition,  we  saw  that  nearly  the  same  conclusions 
must  be  drawn  from  this  study  as  from  that  of  the  reli- 
gious tradition.  First,  we  found  autocracy  to  be  the 
result  of  a  long  evolution,  during  which  no  autocracy 
existed.  We  noted  many  parallel  processes  of  political 
evolution  working  themselves  out  upon  the  surface  of 
the  great  Russian  plain ;  but  no  tradition  of  autocracy 
appeared  to  jje  inherent  in  any  of  them  up  to  the  time 


550  RUSSIA  AND  ITS  CRISIS 

that  autocracy  was  formed  by  the  Muscovite  princes  at 
the  end  of  the  fifteenth  century.  We  saw,  too,  that  the 
process  of  poHtical  development  in  Russia  followed 
the  same  lines  as  in  western  Europe ;  except  that  in  the 
western  and  southern,  and  still  more  in  the  eastern  and 
northern,  parts  it  was  delayed,  as  compared  with  the 
same  process  in  the  west  of  Europe.  This  postpone- 
ment in  political  development  was  accompanied  by,  or 
rather  closely  connected  with,  the  too  slow  growth  of 
the  native  aristocracy,  and  the  still  slower  growth  of 
the  cities,  both  these  features  again  being  more  promi- 
nent in  the  northeastern  part  of  Russia  than  in  the 
southwestern.  Then  we  noted  how  these  differences  in 
social  composition  helped  bring  about  in  northeastern 
Russia  the  development  of  a  better  and  stronger  sys- 
tem of  military  defense  than  the  southwestern  half 
could  afford;  and  this  difference  in  military  power 
sliowed  clearly  how,  in  the  struggle  between  these  two 
types  of  Russian  culture,  the  stronger  prevailed,  where- 
upon the  system  of  autocracy  immediately  evolved 
itself  in  the  northeastern  half.  Thus  the  case  of  autoc- 
racy is  that  of  the  survival  of  the  fittest. 

At  this  point  a  tradition  of  autocracy,  which  until 
then  could  not  possibly  have  existed,  may  have  sprung 
up.  That  autocracy  was  and  remained,  however,  rather 
a  fact  than  an  idea  was  what  our  study  showed.  This 
lack  of  ideological  elements,  then,  it  was  which,  fatally 
reflecting  itself  in  the  political  theory  of  autocracy,  pre- 
vented it  from  becoming  a  real  historical  tradition. 
Autocracy  had,  therefore,  no  juridical  basis  other  than 
a  reference  to  the  power  of  the  "  predecessors  "  of  the 
Muscovite  monarch,  who  in  fact  did  not  at  all  possess 


CONCLUSION  551 

this  authority;  and  another  reference  to  the  sanction 
of  God,  which  could  be  extended  to  any  form  of  poHti- 
cal  power.  But  just  as  the  national  religion  of  the 
sixteenth  century  had  proved  unable  to  form  a  tradi- 
tion, so  neither  the  historical  nor  the  theocratic  claims 
of  autocracy  were  fit  to  build  up  such  a  tradition  on. 
They  also  were  too  national ;  they  smacked  too  charac- 
teristically of  the  age  which  formulated  them ;  and 
at  that  time  no  other  —  particularly  no  legal  —  claim, 
founded  on  any  legal  form  of  transmission  of  power  or 
on  the  Roman  elements  of  the  Byzantine  theory,  was 
provided  for.  Thus,  as  more  civilized  times  have  come, 
autocracy  has  found  itself  under  the  necessity  of  pro- 
viding some  justification  of  a  more  modern  character. 
But  every  one  of  the  principles  borrowed  for  this  pur- 
pose from  European  jurisprudence  proved  contradic- 
tory to  the  very  essence  of  autocracy  and.  if  consistently 
applied,  must  have  ended  by  transforming  autocracy 
into  a  limited  monarchy.  The  new  arguments  advanced 
for  the  justification  of  autocracy  therefore  had  to  be 
cast  aside,  while  the  old  ones  had  long  since  been 
abandoned. 

Thus,  after  a  series  of  attempts  at  self-improve- 
ment, autocracy  remained  what  it  originally  had  been : 
a  material  fact,  not  a  political  principle.  In  the  eleventh 
hour,  and  not  till  then,  an  attempt  was  made  to  apply 
the  principle  of  the  immutability  of  nationahlife  as  an 
argument  for  the  preservation  of  autocracy.  But  no 
serious  proof  for  this  argument  has  ever  been  sub- 
mitted. And  thus  it  is,  even  after  centuries  of  exist- 
ence, that  no  legal  and  moral  tradition  of  autocracy  can 
be  found  to  exist  either  in  institutions  or  in  minds ;  and 


552  RUSSIA  AND  ITS  CRISIS 

SO  nothing  is  opposed  to  its  overthrow  except  the  mere 
fact  of  its  being  there,  in  full  possession  of  power.  As 
a  matter  of  fact,  however,  during  all  the  four  centuries 
of  its  existence,  autocracy  had  been  changing  from  an 
institution  inherited  from  the  "forefathers"  into  a 
theocratic  institution;  even  further,  from  a  theocratic 
power  on  Byzantine  lines  into  a  bureaucratic  monarchy 
on  European  lines;  again,  from  a  bureaucratic  mon- 
archy into  a  manifestation  of  the  absolute  "general 
will"  of  the  people;  still  again,  from  that  absolutism 
of  Hobbes  into  a  mediaeval  monarchy  of  Montesquieu, 
limited  by  the  "intermediate  powers"  of  the  nobility 
and  the  bourgeoisie;  and,  finally,  from  this  monarchy 
of  mediaeval  orders  —  the  Standcsmonarchie  —  into  a 
national  institution  sanctioned  by  the  mere  fact  of  its 
long  existence  and  by  the  supposed  quality  of  its  being 
immutable. 

If,  now,  we  ask  once  more  whether  the  Russian 
political  tradition  is  firm  and  solid,  we  may  answer  that 
a  real  tradition  here,  just  as  in  the  sphere  of  religion, 
was  broken  by  Peter  the  Great,  and  that  since  Peter's 
time  no  new  tradition  has  sprung  up,  while  the  ancient 
one,  having  been  entirely  forgotten,  cannot  possibly  be 
renewed.  It  is  clear,  therefore,  that  the  existing  politi- 
cal form,  however  firm  and  solid  it  may  prove  to  be, 
owes  its  solidity  not  so  much  to  any  tradition  as  to  the 
force  of  inertia,  and  to  such  multiform  and  numerous 
measures  as  the  autocracy  has  been  obliged  to  take  in 
self-defense.  And  this  very  system  of  self-defense, 
whether  from  material  violence  or  from  public  opinion, 
serves  to  prove  how  small  are  the  resources  of  an  ideal 
nature  which  may  be  relied  upon  by  the  autocracy. 


CONCLUSION  553 

This  observation  we  found  to  have  been  made  already 
by  Speransky,  about  a  century  ago. 

While  these  lectures  were  proceeding  at  the  Uni- 
versity of  Chicago,  many  of  my  hearers  may  have 
listened  to  the  eloquent  words  of  Professor  lyenaga  on 
the  subject  of  the  civilization  of  his  native  country, 
Japan.  For  myself,  as  a  Russian,  his  course  of  lectures 
was  particularly  instructive.  When  Mr.  lyenaga  spoke 
of  the  old  spirit  of  the  Japanese  warrior  class  —  their 
gentry,  the  boosJii  —  a  spirit  which  he  said  was  still 
living  in  the  present  generation;  when  he  exalted  the 
spirit  of  self-sacrifice  with  which  the  Japanese  noble- 
men parted  with  half  of  their  feudal  income  in  order 
to  maintain  the  national  unity;  when  he  explained  to 
us  how  the  historical  and  religious  claims  of  the  central 
power  at  last  overcame  the  opposing  forces  of  the 
feudal  elements ;  when  he  told  us  about  the  opposition 
of  the  popular  religion  to  religious  innovations,  how  the 
old  popular  belief  kept  on  co-existing  with  the  estab- 
lished church,  and  how  the  educated  classes  have 
recently  grown  irreligious  —  it  seemed  to  me  as  if  I 
were  listening  to  the  well-known  melodies  of  a  musical 
composition  which  in  its  ensemble  was  entirely  strange. 
I  think  I  have  the  key  to  the  explanation  of  this  simi- 
larity in  parts  and  dissimilarity  of  the  whole.  The 
processes  of  "restoration"  and  "renaissance"  which 
Professor  lyenaga  described  appear  to  have  been  the 
same  as  they  were  in  Russia  during  the  process  of  her 
political  unification  and  Europeanization.  But  the 
tempo  of  these  processes  was  quite  different.  Things 
that  with  us  took  centuries  to  pass  away,  in  Japan 
appear  to  have  been  crowded  into  the  short  space  of 


554  RUSSIA  AND  ITS  CRISIS 

some  decenniums.  Now,  one  of  the  consequences  of 
this  rapidity  of  process  is  that  the  ancient  tradition  of 
Japan,  as  it  were,  had  no  time  to  die  out,  and  has  kept 
enough  of  its  vitality  to  be  able  to  enter  into  some 
desfree  of  combination  with  the  elements  of  the  new 
life  and  culture. 

A  like  combination  was  dreamed  of  by  Russian 
Slavophils,  but  Russian  history  has  provided  us  with 
ample  evidence  that  no  possibility  of  such  combination 
between  new  and  old  exists  any  longer  in  Russia.  The 
old  tradition  was  too  long  a  time  in  dying  out,  and  ele- 
ments of  the  new  culture  struck  root  too  deeply.  No 
hving  elements  of  the  old  historical  tradition  are  now 
in  existence.  That  is  why  some  facts  of  Japanese  life, 
as  they  were  related  by  my  brilliant  colleague,  may 
awaken  in  a  Russian  some  reminiscences  of  a  past  never 
to  be  recalled,  and  may  remind  him  of  some  aspirations 
long  buried  under  new  currents  of  life  and  thought. 

But  there  is  one  discordant  note  in  this  comparison. 
Recent  as  is  the  new  culture  of  Japan,  and  compara- 
tively old  as  is  our  own  new  culture ;  heterogeneous  as 
may  be  the  mixture  of  the  elements  of  old  tradition  and 
of  new  culture  in  Japan,  and  homogeneous  as  are  the 
elements  of  progress  with  us,  yet  Professor  lyenaga 
appears  to  have  had  nothing  to  tell  of  any  serious  social 
or  political  struggle  in  his  country,  and  it  is  chiefly  with 
the  elements  of  such  struggle  that  I  had  to  deal. 

One  explanation  of  the  difference  may  be  that 
society  in  Japan  is  not  no  much  democratized  as  in 
Russia.  It  may  be  that  it  is  not  so  much  demanded  by 
public  opinion  in  Japan  as  in  Russia.  But  another 
explanation  is  that  much  more  is  given.    Japan  enjoys 


CONXLUSION  555 

the  elementary  condition  of  progress  —  a  free  political 
life  —  which  we  are  yet  striving  to  attain.  The  states- 
men that  reformed  Japan  seem  to  have  acted  upon  the 
same  wise  counsel  as  was  given  to  Alexander  I.  by  the 
greatest  of  Russian  statesmen,  Speransky,  to  the  effect 
that  patriotic  battles  should  be  permitted,  not  in  the 
streets,  not  in  the  lecture-rooms  of  universities,  not  in 
annual  sessions  of  Zemstvos,  but  within  the  walls  of  a 
national  diet.  The  point  of  this  advice  was  to  keep  in 
advance  of  public  opinion.  I  do  not  know  what  Rus- 
sian life  would  be  like  now,  if,  nearly  a  century  ago. 
Emperor  Alexander  had  yielded  to  the  patriotic  pres- 
sure of  Speransky  and  had  inaugurated  an  era  of 
political  freedom.  It  is  quite  possible  that  the  political 
opposition  would  have  taken  a  much  more  peaceful 
form ;  that  the  old  spirit  of  the  warrior  class,  so  promi- 
nent at  the  time  of  Catherine  II.  and  Alexander  I., 
would  have  been  preserved  in  a  larger  degree  than  it 
is  now;  that  moderate  elements  would  have  played  a 
much  more  conspicuous  part  in  political  life  and  in 
public  opinion;  that  the  struggle  between  the  govern- 
ment and  public  opinion  would  not  have  taken  the  form 
of  a  continuous  war  between  two  different  races,  each 
possessing  its  own  "  patriotism  "  and  its  own  "  loyalty." 
All  this  might  have  been,  and  something  of  it  may  still 
come,  if  political  conditions  are  made  more  normal ; 
but  with  the  system  of  self-defense  of  the  autocracy, 
the  actual  events  of  our  political  life  took  an  entirely 
different  direction. 

From  what  has  just  been  said  it  may  be  inferred 
that  the  Russian  government  had  the  possibility  of  a 
choice,  and  that  it  freely  chose  the  line  it  now  follows. 


556  RUSSIA  AND  ITS  CRISIS 

To  be  sure,  this  free  choice  would  have  been  impossible 
had  there  been  any  social  forces  to  compel  the  govern- 
ment to  take  another  course.  Thus  the  uncertainty  of 
political  issues  is  chiefly  due  to  the  absence  of  such 
social  forces  as  would  be  able  to  determine  these  issues, 
in  the  same  way  as  they  have  been  determined  wherever 
those  social  forces  were  present.  Not  satisfied,  how- 
ever, with  this  a  priori  inference,  we  reviewed  the  chief 
data  of  the  social  history  of  Russia,  and  found  that  the 
inference  was  true.  The  social  orders  in  Russian  his- 
tory have  always  been  subservient  to  the  aims  of  the 
state.  They  have  had  no  privileges,  except  such  as 
resulted  from  their  state  duties  and  such  as  were  given 
them  by  the  state.  This  was  the  position  of  the  social 
orders  at  the  time  when  the  Muscovite  state  was  in 
process  of  formation,  and  particularly  during  the  six- 
teenth and  seventeenth  centuries.  The  ties  between  these 
classes  and  the  government  were  somewhat  relaxed 
when  the  most  impending  national  military  aims  of  the 
Muscovite  state  were  attained:  and  an  attempt  was 
even  made  by  the  government  of  Catherine  II.  to  trans- 
form the  social  orders  of  Russia  into  a  kind  of  privi- 
leged orders  like  those  of  mediaeval  Europe.  But 
this  attempt  to  form  a  substitute  for  the  missing  social 
tradition  came  too  late,  and  therefore  proved  a  failure. 
For  here,  as  well  as  in  the  realms  of  religion  and  of 
political  institutions,  the  past  had  left  no  legacy  of 
tradition  to  the  present.  And  this  conclusion,  we  saw, 
proved  equally  true,  whether  we  studied  the  history 
of  the  nobility,  of  the  gentry,  or  of  the  bourgeoisie. 

The  tradition  of  the  Russian  nobility  was  purposely 
and  systematically  discarded  by  the  government  itself. 


CONCLUSION  557 

We  have  seen  how  the  ancient  aristocracy  of  lineage 
was  crushed  by  John  IV.  in  the  sixteenth  century,  and 
how  the  second  aristocracy,  that  of  state  service,  was 
democratized  by  the  measures  of  Peter  the  Great.  We 
know  that  the  third  aristocracy,  that  of  the  courtiers  of 
the  eighteenth  century,  was  too  dependent  upon  the 
government  to  form  any  real  social  force.  Then  we 
saw  that  the  Russian  gentry,  though  having  moments 
of  great  brilliancy  in  its  history,  had  little  or  no  chance 
of  ever  becoming  independent.  This  was,  to  be  sure, 
the  class  most  needed  by  the  government  to  serve  as 
military  power  and  political  support.  In  return  for 
this  service,  the  members  of  the  gentry  were  actually 
granted  whatever  they  wanted :  lands  and  peasants, 
places  in  the  state  service,  appointments  by  the  Tsar. 
The  whole  peasant  class  was  sacrificed  to  the  pressing 
needs  of  the  state.  There  was  a  time,  in  the  middle 
and  the  second  half  of  the  eighteenth  century,  when  it 
seemed  as  if  the  gentry  would  become  interested  in 
affirming  their  social  position  through  the  use  of  politi- 
cal privileges.  But  just  then  the  government,  having 
no  more  need  of  the  gentry  for  military  purposes,  was 
ready  to  listen  to  the  cry  for  freedom  rising  loud  and 
louder  from  the  oppressed  peasantry.  So,  instead  of 
political  representation,  the  gentry  were  granted  pre- 
dominance in  local  government.  This,  however,  they 
did  not  appreciate  as  a  class  privilege;  they  looked 
upon  their  local  duties  and  rights  merely  as  stepping- 
stones  to  the  state  service.  Thus  the  chance  for  getting 
political  privileges  was  lost,  and  when,  some  three- 
quarters  of  a  century  later,  the  gentry  were  dispos- 
sessed of  their  slaves,  they  claimed  in  vain  the  right  of 


5S8  RUSSIA  AND  ITS  CRISIS 

voice  ill  a  reform  which  was  to  deprive  them  of  a 
third  of  their  income. 

Little  has  been  said  about  the  Russian  bourgeoisie, 
for  the  reason  that  until  very  recent  times  there  w  as  no 
bourgeoisie  in  Russia  worthy  the  name.  The  depend- 
ence of  the  Russian  trading  and  commercial  class  on 
the  government  was  still  greater  than  that  of  the 
gentry;  and  this  could  but  be  expected,  since  the  cher- 
ishing and  fostering  of  Russian  industries  are  entirely 
due  to  state  measures. 

Thus  we  were  obliged  to  conclude  that  there  was 
on  the  stage  no  social  force  which  could  influence 
political  life  and  take  part  in  the  development  of  politi- 
cal ideas.  Nevertheless  there  zvcre  in  Russia  a  political 
life  and  a  political  development.  Who,  then,  were  the 
representatives,  and  what  role  did  they  play  in  the 
history  of  Russian  civilization? 

We  have  seen  that  in  the  beginning  these  were  men 
of  the  gentry,  the  first  to  become  educated.  The  state 
itself  W'as  obliged  to  give  them  education,  for  the  pur- 
pose of  its  own  Europeanization.  Their  class  feeling 
was  weak,  but  this  very  weakness  made  them  more 
sensitive  to  the  ideal  side  of  education.  Thus,  men  of 
the  gentry  who,  so  long  as  they  represented  their  class, 
were  politically  insignificant,  became  stronger  and 
stronger  after  they  began  to  represent  general  public 
opinion.  With  their  political  idealism  they  were  under- 
mining chiefly  their  class  privileges,  and  the  govern- 
ment was  not  entirely  averse  to  this  kind  of  public 
opinion.  But  then,  after  having  attained  the  first  great 
aim  of  their  program  —  the  liberation  of  the  peasants  — 
they  looked  to  the  second  —  political  freedom.     And 


CO\XLUSION  559 

here  their  successes  were  for  a  long  time  checked  by  the 
self-defense  of  autocracy.  What,  now,  are  their  means 
of  attaining  their  second  aim?  Is  it  as  yet  the  ideal 
force  of  public  opinion  alone,  or  are  there  other  and 
stronger  means  at  their  disposal? 

We  must  observe,  first,  that  already,  in  attaining 
their  primary  aim,  they  used  forces  other  than  those  of 
mere  opinion.  We  had  occasion  to  mention  that  the 
emancipation  of  the  peasants  was  in  a  large  degree  the 
result  of  a  social  danger  steadily  increasing  in  propor- 
tion as  serfdom  was  becoming  unbearable.  Not  less 
important  was  it  that  the  economic  growth  of  the 
country  was  checked  or  impeded  by  the  preservation  of 
slavery;  and  thus  economic  reasons,  together  with 
social  and  philanthropic  ones,  tended  in  the  direction 
of  emancipation. 

All  these  and  other  reasons  may  likewise  have 
played  a  part  in  the  second  phase  of  the  political 
struggle.  What  must  be  mentioned  first  is  the  enor- 
mous growth  of  the  politically  conscious  social  elements 
that  make  public  opinion  in  Russia.  The  gentry  still 
play  a  part  among  these  elements,  but  are  by  far  not 
the  only  social  medium  of  public  opinion,  as  they  were 
before  the  emancipation  of  the  peasants.  Members  of 
the  ancient  gentry  are  now  found  in  all  branches  of 
public  life:  in  the  press,  in  public  instruction,  in  the 
liberal  professions,  not  to  speak  of  the  state  service, 
and  particularly  the  local  self-government.  But  it 
would  be  impossible  to  say  what  is  now  the  class  opinion 
of  the  gentry.  The  fact  is  tbat  the  gentry  are  no 
longer  a  class ;  they  are  too  much  intermingled  with 
other  social   elements  in  every  position  they  occupy, 


56o  RUSSIA  AND  ITS  CRISIS 

including  that  of  landed  proprietors.  By  this  ubiquity 
the  gentry  have  added  to  the  facilities  for  the  general 
spread  of  public  opinion;  but  as  a  class  they  influence 
public  opinion  m  an  even  smaller  measure  than  in 
former  times.  The  "  men  of  mixed  ranks,"  the  Raz- 
nochintsec,  have  enormously  increased  in  all  vocations; 
and  the  democratic  spirit  brought  by  them,  and  fostered 
by  the  liberal  and  radical  press,  is  a  distinctive  feature 
of  the  educated  class  in  present-day  Russia. 

Of  course,  this  educated  class  is  not  politically 
homogeneous,  and  the  political  opinions  cherished  by 
its  various  representatives  are  widely  different.  We 
have  distinguished  the  two  chief  currents,  which  we 
called  the  liberal  and  the  socialistic.^  Now,  the  pre- 
dominant feature  of  political  life  in  Russia,  owing  to 
its  abnormal  conditions,  is  that  political  opinion, 
instead  of  differentiating  and  splitting  into  small  groups 
and  factions,  tends  rather  toward  united  and  common 
action  against  the  general  enemy,  which  is  represented 
by  these  abnormal  conditions.  This  process  of  unifica- 
tion of  public  opinion  is  twofold.  First,  only  such 
shades  of  political  opinion  as  are  more  or  less  radical 
are  represented.  There  being  no  "  spoils,"  political 
opinion,  having  had  no  chance  to  back  the  private  inter- 
ests of  any  particular  group  or  person,  is  disinterested, 
abstractly  humanitarian,  largely  democratic,  and  thus 
naturally  radical.  That  is  why  the  scale  on  which  a 
reconciliation  and  unification  of  public  opinion  are 
striven  for  is  not  so  large  as  to  preclude  the  possibility 
of  such  unification.     In  the  second  place,  the  scope  of 

'  There  is  no  real  conservative  opinion  in  Russia ;  there  is  only 
an  official  opinion,  that  of  the  government,  which  does  not  count  here. 


CONCLUSION  561 

divergence  among  different  shades  of  opposition  is 
steadily  diminishing  just  in  the  measure  that  poHtical 
struggle  is  going  on.  In  studying  the  history  of  the 
liberal  and  socialistic  currents,  we  have  found  that  the 
chasm  existing  between  them  at  their  inception  was 
perpetually  narrowing,  so  as  to  make  possible  at  last 
almost  an  alliance,  or  at  least  concerted  action  for  an 
aim  which  was  admitted  to  be  general.  We  have  seen 
that  the  liberal  current  was  gradually  radicalized  and 
democratized,  and  that  it  one  by  one  eliminated  from 
its  program  such  elements  as  might  have  only  a  class 
interest.  At  the  same  time,  as  we  have  noted,  the 
Utopian  element  was  slowly  but  steadily  vanishing  from 
the  socialistic  programs;  and  thus  the  way  has  been 
paved  for  the  transformation  of  a  revolutionary  into 
a  political  party,  and  of  its  methods  of  struggle  from 
oriental  to  European. 

Political  reform  —  this  is  now  the  general  cry  of  all 
shades  of  political  opinion  in  Russia.  But  is  this  only 
an  opinion?  Are  there  no  interests,  no  organizations, 
ready  to  fight  for  political  freedom?  Are  there  no 
impelling  forces  to  extort  it  from  a  reluctant  govern- 
ment ? 

We  have  found  the  answer  in  the  study  of  the  pres- 
ent situation.  Yes,  the  impelling  forces  are  there,  and 
they  are  twofold :  the  material  crisis  and  the  political 
disaffection.  The  picture  here  drawn,  at  any  period 
before  January,  1905,  might  have  been  considered  an 
exaggeration;  but  now  nobody  can  think  it  an  over- 
statement. Russia  is  passing  through  a  crisis;  she  is 
sick ;  and  her  sickness  is  so  grave  as  to  demand  imme- 
diate and  radical  cure.     Palliatives  can  be  of  no  use; 


562  RUSSIA  AND  ITS  CRISIS 

rather,  they  but  increase  the  gravity  of  the  situation. 
To  pretend  that  all  is  right  in  Russia,  except  for  a  few 
*'  ill-intentioned  "  persons  who  are  making  all  the  fuss, 
is  no  longer  ridiculous,   it  is  criminal.     Upon  quite 
peaceful  and  law-abiding  citizens,  who  never  shared  in 
any  political  struggle  and  never  had  any  definite  politi- 
cal opinions,  the  feeling  begins  to  dawn  that  the  system 
of  self-defense  practiced  by  the  government  precludes 
general  progress  and  the  development  of  private  initia- 
tive, just  as,  forty  years  ago,  progress  was  precluded 
by   the    further   existence   of   serfdom.      Indeed,    the 
development  of  private  initiative  is  held  by  the  govern- 
ment itself  to  be  the  chief  need  of  the  present  time,  and 
the  chief  remedy  for  the  present  industrial,  commercial, 
and  agricultural  crisis  which  has  become  endemic  in 
Russia.     It  would  be  presumption  on  the  part  of  a 
historian  to  predict  what,  under  these  conditions,  will 
be  the  probable  result  of  the  secular  conflict  between 
Russian  opposition  and  alleged  tradition,  between  pub- 
lic opinion  and  government.    We  must  leave  to  history 
its  whims,  says  Herzen.     And  we  must  acknowledge 
that  there  is  a  large  scope  for  the  whims  of  history  in 
the  situation  as  we  have  described  it.     Increased  and 
united  as  they  are,  the  forces  of  opposition  are  still  not 
strong  enough  to  replace  the  government  by  a  violent 
overthrow.     But  they  are  strong  enough  to  make  the 
use  of  violence  continuous,  and  by  increasing  this  to 
preclude  any  further  peaceful  work  of  civilization.    No 
form  of  government  can  survive,  we  may  say  with 
Speransky,    which   possesses   no   moral    force   and    is 
obliged  to  carry  all  its  orders  into  execution  by  mere 
material  force.    And  if  the  only  question  that  remains, 


CONCLUSION  563 

is,  How  long  will  the  material  force  of  the  bayonets 
side  with  the  government?  then  the  position  is  des- 
perate. Where  thirt}--five  thousand  policemen  are  sent 
to  the  villages,  while  no  student  of  statistics  is  per- 
mitted to  enter  them,  the  condition  of  affairs  must  be 
recognized  as  utterly  indefensible.  And  a  good  politi- 
cal strategist,  if  he  will  not  surrender,  ought  to  take 
thought  not  as  to  further  defenses,  but  as  to  a  more 
tenable  position. 

It  may,  of  course,  have  been  inferred,  from  what 
has  been  said  in  the  preceding,  what  this  tenable  posi- 
tion is,  in  the  view  of  Russian  public  opinion.  Russia 
wants  a  political  representation,  and  guaranties  of 
what  are  called  the  fundamental  rights  of  individuality ; 
i.  e.,  freedom  of  belief  and  of  speech,  the  right  of  asso- 
ciation and  of  public  meetings,  liberty  of  the  press,  a 
strict  regime  of  law,  and  the  free  course  of  justice, 
which  implies  the  repeal  of  arbitrary  edicts  and  regula- 
tions, the  abolition  of  extraordinary  tribunals,  and  last, 
but  not  least,  a  habeas-corpus  act,  /.  c,  security  from 
arbitrary  arrest  and  domiciliary  search.  There  is  no 
general  opinion  as  to  the  kind  of  representative  institu- 
tions wanted,  but  a  medium  current  may  easily  be 
found.  Public  opinion  will  not  now  be  satisfied  with  a 
consultative  chamberj  and  will  not  join  the  extremists 
who  want  a  federative  republic  and  a  referendum ; 
i.  e.,  immediate  legislation  by  the  people.  The  great 
majority  will  be  glad  to  have  what  was  once  claimed 
by  the  liberals  of  Tver,  i.  c,  a  constitution  similar  to 
that  which  was  sanctioned  in  Bulgaria  by  the  Russian 
Tsar  twenty-five  years  ago.  One  must  know  that  the 
Bulgarian  constitution  is  consistently  democratic,  and 


564  RUSSIA  AND  ITS  CRISIS 

that  it  includes  both  of  the  features  claimed  by  the 
democratic  liberals  of  Russia;  i.  c,  universal  suffrage 
and  one  chamber.  The  habitual  argument  of  the  con- 
servatives, that  Russia  is  not  ready  for  a  constitution, 
is  cut  short  by  this  example  of  Bulgaria.  The  broad 
democratic  basis  of  the  constitution  of  that  country  did 
not  correspond  to  the  degree  of  political  development 
of  the  Bulgarian  people ;  but  it  proved  highly  valuable 
as  a  means  of  promoting  their  political  education,  and 
precludes  for  a  long  time  any  discussion  about  further 
changes  in  the  form  of  government,  which  cannot  fail 
to  establish  a  good  and  durable  political  tradition,  and 
to  concentrate  all  struggle  within  the  legal  frame  of 
guaranteed  institutions. 

Whether  this  example  of  political  wisdom,  which 
takes  care,  not  only  of  the  present,  but  also  of  the 
future,  will  be  followed  by  Russian  statesmen  is  an 
open  question.  But  for  a  historian  there  is  no  question 
as  to  whether  there  will  or  will  not  be  any  political 
reform  at  all.  History  may  have  its  whims,  but  it  also 
has  its  laws;  and  if  the  law  of  Russian  history  is 
progress,  as  we  have  tried  to  demonstrate,  political 
reform  may  not  be  avoided.  To  deny  it  is  to  despair 
of  the  future  of  Russia. 


ANALYTICAL  INDEX 


Abolition   of  autocracy:     present   general 

demand  for,  176. 
Aborigines:   fate  of  Russian,  6. 
Absence    of    spirit    of    proselytisra    from 

Orthodox  church,  127. 

Absolutism:  bureaucratic,  of  Peter  the 
Great,  170;  enlightened,  of  eighteenth 
century,  loo. 

Academy  for  theological  studies  founded 
in  Moscow  (1687),  108. 

"Acknowledging-priests"  Old-believers: 
historical  sketch  of,  02. 

Active  resistance:  Finnish  party  of,  in 
1904,  525  f. 

Administrative  exile,  195  f. 

Adoption :  of  title  of  Tsar  by  John  IV.,  164; 
of  Persigny's  press  law,  204.  263  f. 

Agitation:  socialistic,  in  villages  twenty 
years  ago  and  at  present,  360. 

Agrarian:  nobles  and  democrats,  assembly 
of,  at  Moscow  (1S65).  274  f.;  legislation 
and  indi\idualistic  tendencies  in  the  Mir, 
350;  troubles  continuous  after  Catherine 
II.,  359;  revolution  expected  by  Russian 
government  in  the  sixties  of  last  century, 
386;  uprising  in  its  first  attempts.  391; 
movement  in  the  late  seventies  and  its 
failure,  413;  crisis  and  its  causes,  430, 
439;  uprisings  (1902)  in  governments  of 
Poltava  and  Harkov,  508;  movement, 
509. 

"Agrarian  League":  of  Social  Revolution- 
aries (1902)  and  its  propaganda,  508  f.; 
organizes  agrarian  revolution  and  agra- 
rian programs  (1900),  492,  499. 

Agreement:  Paris  declaration  of  (Decem- 
ber, 1904),  between  radicals  and  liberals, 
524- 

Agricultural:  character  of  Russia  and 
United  States  of  America;  8,  co-opera- 
tion as  program  of  Russian  .socialism. 
385;  crisis,  435;  its  cause,  446  ff,  459; 
means  of  relief  proposed,  458.  474  ff.; 
country.  Russia  still  an,  435;  conditions 
in  southwestern,  south-central,  and 
northwestern  Russia,  437;  effects  at 
present  of  Russian  early  settlement,  438; 
Goorko  and  Council  of  State  on  agri- 
cultural and  financial  crisis,  and  solu- 
tion thereof,  473  ff. 

Agriculture:   symptoms  of  decay  in,  435, 

451- 
Agriculturists    constitute   80   per  cent,  of 

Russian  fX)pulation,  342. 


Agronomists'  work  for  Zemstvos,  290. 

Ak.sakov,  Ivan,  284,  316,  319. 

AIex.ander  I.:  favorable  toward  sectarian- 
ism, hi;  and  constitutions,  172  ff.,  257; 
reforms  of.  173,  254;  renounces  his  con- 
.stitutional  project  of  1819.  174.  257;  and 
Metternich,  174,  257;  and  Decembrists, 
176  f.,  254;  reactionary  policy  of,  257  f.; 
confirms  "charter  of  nobility"  granted 
by  Catherine  II.,  275. 

Alexander  II.,  182  f.,  187;  Russian  "intel- 
lectuals" in  time  of,  262,  281;  era  of 
"Great  Reforms"  of,  262  ff.,  477;  an- 
swers petition  of  1865,  283;  appeals  to 
society  in  November,  1878,  304;  death 
of  (killed  March  13,  1881),  and  Meli- 
kov's  "constitution,"  312  ff.,  419. 

Alexander  III.,  206  f.;  reactionary  move- 
ment under,  269;  determined  upon  pre- 
servation of  autocracy,  314  f.;  executive 
committee's  address  (March,  18S1)  to, 
320;  death  of  (1894),  revives  Hberal 
movement  in  Zemstvos.  325;  declara- 
tion against  peasants'  idea  of  a  general 
land  partition,  510  n.  18. 

Alexis.  536;  and  strangers  in  his  capital 
(1652),  38. 

".\ll-brethren"  (1895):  spiritualistic  sec- 
tarians and  successors  to  the  Dookho- 
bory.  92,  iio;  represent  type  of  Russian 
of  the  future,  120. 

Allen,  William:  report  of,  on  the  Molo- 
kanee  (1819),  113  f. 

"All-humanness"  of  Russian  character, 
according  to  Dostoyevsky,  17. 

"  AHiance  for  the  Emancipation":  backing 
Emancipation ,  519, 

Alliance:  Peasants',  formed  by  Agrarian 
League,  510;  of  teachers  and  pupils  of 
college.'^  and  secondary  schools  for  revolu- 
tionary purpo.ses,  511. 

.'Vllotments  of  landholdings:  decreasing 
since  1861,  436;  size  of.  insufficient  from 
beginning  for  fjcasants  of  southern  Rus- 
sia, 449. 

.'Amalgamation  of  Russian  belief  with  pa- 
ganism. 67. 

America:  socialism  and  democracy  in, 
336  ff. 

American  and  Russian  colonists,  7;  mone- 
tary history  of,  469  ff.  See  also  United 
States. 

Amorphousness:  chief  feature  of  Russian 
national  type,  13,  20  f.,  547. 


565 


566 


RUSSIA  AND  ITS  CRISIS 


Anarchism:  Leo  Tolstoy's  Christian, 
taught  in  1770  by  Euphemius,  100;  of 
Bakoonin  replaced  by  "scientific"  so- 
cialism of  Marx,  341;  Proudhon's,  336, 
3691.;  forerunner  of  Russian  socialism, 
361,  363.  367;  no  part  of  theory  of  Peo- 
ple's Will  party,  420. 
Ancient:  aristocracy  of  lineage  in  fifteenth 
and  sixteenth  centuries,  and  its  decline, 
228;  aristocracy  crushed  by  John  IV., 
557;  deliberative  assemblies  recom- 
mended by  Koshelov,  309;  nobility  vs. 
new,  in  seventeenth  century,  229;  tra- 
dition, defenders  of,  41  ff. 
Anna,  Empress:    Magna  Charta  of,  236; 

founds  Corps  of  Nobility  (1732),  250. 
Antagonism:   historical,   between   Russian 

and  Greek  church,  73. 
Anti-aristocratic     character     of     Russian 

monarchy,  158. 
Anti-canonic  position  of  Holy  Synod  since 

Peter  the  Great,  86. 
Antichrist's  coming  in  doctrine  of  "Old- 
believers,"  93  ff.,  106. 
Anticipations  by  peasants  of  emancipation, 

under  Catherine  II.,  357. 
Apologists    of    established    church    decry 

religious  tolerance,  123. 
Appeal:    of  Alexander   II.  to  society,  in 
November,  1878,  304;    of  Zemstvos  to 
Nicholas  II.   (1894-95)   for  more  free- 
dom, 325  f. 
Appearance  of  prophetism  in  Russia,  106. 
Approximation,  gradual,  of  radical  (revolu- 
tionaries')   and    liberal   (constitutional- 
ists') program,  523  f. 
Arabian  conquests  of  Turks  in  their  effect 

on  southern  Russia,  144. 
Arbitrary  rule  legalized  by  statutes  begins 

with  statute  of  1S65,  204. 
Arguments  of  Speransky  in  favor  of  a  con- 
stitution, 173  f.     See  also  185,  309.  553. 
555- 
Aristocracy:  local,  and  its  rise,  134  ff;  less 
developed  feudal,  135;   and  prince,  139, 
147  f.,  158;  of  lineage  in  fifteenth  and 
sixteenth  centuries,  and  its  decline,  228; 
crushed  by  John  IV.,  229,  557;  of  Chin, 
or    rank,   and    the    courtiers   of    eight- 
eenth century,  234,  557;    protection  of, 
by   Demetrius   Tolstoy,    230;    of   state 
service  democratized  by  Peter  the  Great, 
557- 
Armenians:    revolutionary   spirit    among, 

S03  ff. 
Arminius:   a  novel,  influencing  Herzen  in 

shaping  his  socialistic  theory,  368. 
Army:  revolutionary  spirit  in,  512. 
Arrest  and  imprisonment  of  political  sus- 
pects, 196. 
Aspirations  of  lower  classes  in  Russia,  342. 
Assertive  and  arrogant  stage  of  national- 
istic idea,  36. 


"Assignats":  or  national  paper  men';/, 
introduced  by  Catherine  II.,  467. 

Attempt:  of  Slavophils  at  reconciliation 
between  spirit  of  tradition  and  spirit  of 
religious  freedom.  56,  129;  to  supplant 
Zemstvo  schools  by  parish  .schools.  212  f.; 
of  Stepnyak  at  reconciliation  with  liber- 
alism (1890),  320  ff.,  42S;  at  reconcilia- 
tion of  two  sociaUstic  factions  (1889  ff.), 
429  ff. 

Attempts:  first,  to  construct  a  nationalistic 
theory,  46;  at  "  self-improvement"  of 
autocracy  under  Alexander  I.,  173;  to 
influence  press  in  a  positive  sense,  208; 
of  government  to  include  aristocracy  in 
its  system  of  self-defense,  239;  of  agra- 
rian uprising,  391. 

"Austrian  hierarchy"  in  Russia,  95. 

Authorities  of  state  and  church  and  non- 
conformists, 124. 

Authors:  real,  of  Emancipation  Act,  267. 

Autocephalic  character  of  Russian  church 
since  end  of  sixteenth  century,  79. 

Autocracy:  embodiment  of  "power"  of 
state,  according  to  doctrine  of  Slavophils, 
56;  immutability  of,  131  f.;  second  essen- 
tial feature  of  national  type,  132,  136; 
development  of ,  136;  nature  of,  148;  com- 
paratively new  and  a  product  of  histor- 
ical evolution.  158.  540;  has  no  tradi- 
tion, 159,  549  f'.  Byzantine  in  theory, 
160;  and  John  III.,  160;  search  for  legal 
sanction  of,  162;  a  fact,  not  a  legal  insti- 
tution, 164;  theocratic  sanction  of,  pre- 
vails over  the  legal,  164  f.;  insufficiency 
of  such  theocratic  sanction  of,  167; 
natural  law  as  basis  of,  168;  philosophic 
justification  of,  170  f.;  self-improvement 
of,  during  nineteenth  century,  173  ff.; 
irritating  and  embittering  public  opin- 
ion, 173. 176  f.,  182;  abohtion  of,  present 
general  demand  for.  176  f.;  turns  from 
"self-improvement"  to  "self-defense," 
179,  552;  first  and  foremost  in  trinity  of 
oflaci.il  nationalism,  182;  new  require- 
ments for  self-defense  of,  187;  Alexander 
in.  and  Nicholas  II.  determined  to  pre- 
serve, 314  f.,  327;  and  local  autonomy, 
316;  as  now  viewed  by  Cheecherrin, 
331  f.;  and  liberalism,  as  viewed  by 
Witte,  332;  democratism  of,  origin  of 
view,  353  f.  (see  also  533  n.  31);  upheld 
by  peasants  against  nobility,  353;  sacri- 
fices peasantry  to  landlords  in  sixteenth 
century,  355;  evasive  answer  of,  to 
"Petition  of  Rights"  (November  19, 
1904),  533  f.;  self-defense  of,  and  official 
nationalism,  530;.  founded  at  end  of 
fifteenth  century  by  Muscovite  princes, 
55°- 

Autonomy:    autocracy  and  local,  316. 

Axelrod:  formulates  (1880)  point  of  vi?w 
of  "pure  socialism,"  423;  leader,  with 
Plehanov,  of  "Group  for  the  Liberation 
of  Labor,"  425,  487. 


ANALYTICAL  INDEX 


567 


Backbone  missing  in  Russian  virtues  and 
Ru^jian  \ices.  18. 

BacKward  and  forward  movement  in  Rus- 
sian society  of  eighteenth  century,  41,45. 

Baden-Powell:  on  Village  Commur.itus  in 
India,  350. 

Bailaya  Kreenitza:  metropolitan  seat  of 
bishop  of  moderate  sect  of  the  "Old- 
believers,"  94. 

Bahrin:  or  Russian  landlord  of  eighteenth 
century,  44. 

Bakoonin,  285;  demanding  constitutional 
assembly  (1862  ff.),  278  f.,  380;  and  idea 
of  "federalism,"  310  f.;  and  beginning 
of  Russian  socialism,  341;  anarchism 
of,  replaced  by  "scientific"  socialism  of 
Marx,  341;  replies  to  Herzen's  criticism 
of  the  "new  generation,"  37S;  advocates 
revolutionary  struggle  vs.  Herzen's 
peaceful  opposition,  379;  and  Herzen, 
381;  and  origins  of  revolutionary  move- 
ment in  Russia.  383;  theory  of,  carried 
to  extreme  by  Nechayev,  39';;  reaction 
against,  in  favor  of  Marxism,  398  ff.,  405. 

Bank:  founded  for  benefit  of  nobility,  240; 
for  assistance  of  peasants  (1883),  450, 

Baptist:  faith,  profession  of,  a  means  of 
escaping  persecution  by  state,  122,  126; 
missionaries  and  Stundists,  121  f. 

Bashkin,  Matthias:  condemned  on  charge 
of  "Latin  heresy"  by  council  of  bishops 
in  Moscow  (1554),  104. 

Basilius  Shooysky:    the  Tsar  boyar,  355. 

Bazahrov:  in  Tourguenev's  Fathers  and 
Sons  representative  of  "  new  generation ' ' 
of  the  sixties,  374, 

Beginning:  of  national  self-consciousness 
and  self-criticism,  33;  of  public  opinion, 
249  f.;  of  formal  conflict  between  gov- 
ernment and  country  (1902),  478  ff. 

Bekhtayev:  on  present  condition  of  px;as- 
antry,  443;  scheme  of,  of  amelioration, 
458. 

Belinsky:    aiding  Herzen's  views,  372. 

Bell:   organ  of  Herzen,  372,  383. 

Beormas  at  Gandvik:  i.  e.,  the  White  Sea, 
141. 

Bernstein:  revision  theories  of,  of  Marx's 
doctrine  defeated,  487. 

Bezobrazov:  on  "Charter  of  Nobility,"  275. 

Bicameral  system  of  representation:  ad- 
vocated by  Count  Orlov-Daveedov.  276; 
and  universal  franchise,  questions  touch- 
ing, 521  f. 

"Bill  of  coercion":  Valooyev's  report  to 
committee  of  ministers  in  1879  on  new, 
187. 

B'ack  Land  Partition  party,  421  f. 
Bodin:   on  nationalistic  theory,  47. 
Bolteen,  the  historian:  aids  Catherine  IL's 
theory  of  nationalism,  47, 


Books  forbidden  in  public  libraries  and 
books  permitted  in  people's  libraries, 
201,  478. 

Booleeghin,  544. 

Boris  Godoonov,  354,  356. 

Bourgeois  stri\-in.n;s  of  "People's  Will"  party 
opposed  by  "General  Land  Partition" 
party,  422  f,:  Russian  liberalism  not 
bourgeois,  226. 

Bourgeoisie  in  Russia,  225  f.,  558;  not 
aided  by  pouvoirs  inlcrmidiaires  of 
Catherine  IL,  171. 

Boyars:  and  sons  of  boyars  under  John 
IIL,  157,  229;  political  program  of  con- 
stitution by  (about  1598).  354  f.;  or 
landlords,  name  of  peasants  for  .social- 
istic agitators  twenty  years  ago,  360  f. 

Break:  of  old  tradition,  20;  in  political 
tradition  under  Peter  the  Great,  16S, 
S52;  in  religious  tradition  and  its  effect 
upon  educated  class,  83,  549, 

Bulgarian  constitution:  would  satisfy  lib- 
erals, 304  f,,  563. 

Bund,  Jewish:    see  Jewish  Bund. 

Bunge:    financial  policy  of  (1883),  444  f. 

Bureaucracy:  in  the  early  sixties  omnipo- 
tent in  St.  Petersburg,  271;  repressing 
work  of  Zemstvos,  292  f. 

Bureaucratic  absolutism  of  Peter  the  Great, 
170. 

Bussurmans  (Mussulmans),  10. 
Byzantine:  influence  in  shaping  Muscovite 

military     system,     150;      autocracy    in 

theory,  160. 
Byzantinism :  Russian,  of  Mr.  Leontiev,  61 

Canada:    Dookhobory  in.  113,  119. 
Canonizing  of  national  saints,  77. 
Capillarity:     means    of    defense    against 

social,  9. 
Capitation  tax  of  Peter  the  Great  alxil- 

ished,  444. 

Castratoes:  spiritualistic  sectarians  (about 
1770).  92,  loS, 

Catalogues  for  reading:    two  official,  202. 

Catherine  IL:  St.  Petersburg  of,  25;  and 
new  ideas,  26,  45,  252  f.;  and  public 
opinion  during  French  Revolution,  26; 
founder  of  secondary  schools,  26,  215; 
aided  by  Bolteen  in  her  theory  of  nation- 
alism, 47;  indifferent  toward  .sectarian- 
ism, 1 11;  rejects  Rousseau's  theory  of 
"social  contract,"  and  attempts  to  trans- 
form "despotism"  into  a  "monarchy" 
according  to  doctrine  of  Montesquieu, 
170;  grants  "Charter  of  \ol)ility,"  and 
pouvnirs  intermiiliaires.  helping  nobility, 
but  not  bourgeoisie  nor  serfs.  171,  552; 
and  general  assembly  of  deputies,  171, 
237;  fails  to  start  a  representation.  172; 
and  her  land  grants,  23s;  transforms 
gentry  into  a  privilegecl  class,  237; 
favors  emancipation  of   peasants,   247; 


568 


RUSSIA  AND  ITS  CRISIS 


uses  satire  against  liberal  journalists,2  5 2 ; 
persecutes  Masons  for  aiding  philan- 
thropists, 252;  frees  gentry  from  compul- 
sory military  service,  357  f.;  continuous 
agrarian  troubles  after  time  of,  359; 
introduces  "assignats"  or  national  paper 
money,  467.     See  also  Poogachov. 

Caucasus:   disaffection  in,  503. 

Causes:  for  reformation  in  general  and  in 
Russia  in  particular,  loi  f.;  of  difference 
in  Russian  liberalism  to  be  found  in  the 
peculiarities  of  the  social  structure,  225; 
of  agrarian  crisis,  439  ff. 

Censorship,  204  ff.;   and  Goloveen,  208  f. 

Censure,  previous,  204,  206. 

Central  government:  and  colonists,  10; 
power  of,  strengthened  by  colonization, 
140,  148,  157- 

Ccntralistic  reorganization  and  unification 
of  social  democracy  (1903),  489. 

"Chaikovtsee"  circle  of  St.  Petersburg  and 
"go-to-the-people  movement,"  404  f. 

Chambers  in  provinces:  advocated  by 
Demchinskee  and  Sharahpov,  331. 

Chancery:  Third  Section  of  his  Majesty's 
Private,  1S6,  192,  204. 

Change  in  conditions  of  Ufe  caused  by  in- 
crease of  expenditures,  440. 

Changes:  in  social  composition  of  liberal 
party  through  the  decay  of  gentry,  286; 
in  prosperity  of  peasants  from  1861  to 
present  time.  435  f-i  in  Russia's  history, 
rapid  and  essential,  546. 

Chappe  d'Auteroche:  criticised  by  Cath- 
erine II.,  47. 

Character:  of  settlers  of  Russia  and  United 
States  different,  and  cause  thereof,  10; 
of  Russians  described  by  Lanin,  13;  and 
by  Dostoyevsky,  16. 

Charity  in  early  Russia,  71. 

"Charter  of  Nobility":  granted  by  Cath- 
erine II.,  and  confirmed  by  Alexander  I., 
171,  275;  as  viewed  by  Bezobrazov  and 
Golohvastov,  275. 

"Cheap  money":  general  demand  for, 
469  ff. 

Cheecherrin:  a  former  conservative,  states 
chief  demand  of  hberalism  in  his  book, 
Russia  on  the  Eve  of  the  Twentieth  Cen- 
tury, 328  ff.;  view  of,  on  autocracy,  331  f. 

Cherkassky:  one  of  real  authors  of  Eman- 
cipation Act,  267. 
Cherneeschevsky:    book  of.  What  to  Do? 
376;    as  a  raznochinex,  376;  on  emanci- 
pation of  peasants  (1857  ff.),  387. 
Chin:   meaning  of,  234. 
Cholera  of  1892-93  starts   new  movement 

for  reform,  324. 
Christian :  anarcliism  of  Leo  Tolstoy  taught 
by  Euphemius  about  1770,  100;  self- 
absorption  in  love  essence  of  eastern 
civilization,  55;  thought,  evangelical 
and  spirituaUstic  currents  of,  92,  in. 


Chronic  insolvency:  present  condition  of 
peasantry,  443. 

Churches  and  priests:  increase  disprDp.or- 
tionately  in  number  compared  with  the 
Orthodox  population,  90.  See  also  Es- 
tablished church,  Orthodox  church,  and 
Russian  church. 

City  population  at  various  periods  of 
Russian  history,  226. 

CiviUzation:  present  struggle  of,  in  Russia 
significant,  4. 

Clandestine  press,  210  f. 

Clash:  between  democratic  nationaUsts 
and  landed  proprietors  on  question  of 
the  Mir,  271;  between  poUtical  and 
social  radicaUsm,  281,  282.  See  also 
Conflict. 

Clement:  circular  letter  of  metropolitan, 
quoted,  137. 

Clergy:  condition  of,  in  early  Russian 
church,  70  f. 

Coercion,  bill  of:   see  Bill  of  coercion. 

Colonists:  in  Russia  and  America  (United 
States).  7;  social  life  of,  8;  central  gov- 
ernment and,  10. 

Colonization:  conditions  of,  different  in 
Russia  and  United  States.  3  f.;  develop- 
ment of,  5  438;  strengthening  central 
power,  140;  region  of  southern,  11  ff.; 
146. 

Coming  of  Antichrist:  in  doctrine  of  "Old- 
beUevers,"  93  ff.,  106. 

Commerce  and  war:  outward  springs  of 
poUtical  development,  135,  142  f. 

Commune:  see  Mir  and  Village  commun- 
ity. 

Comparative  table  of  harvest  returns,  456. 

Competition:  among  Russian  peasants, 
struggle  for,  451;  eUminated  under 
VVitte's  regime,  464  f-',  and  struggle  be- 
tween Social  Revolutionaries  and  Social 
Democrats,  the  former  winning,  493  f. 

Condition:  of  clergy  in  earlier  Russian 
church,  70  f.;  of  serfs  during  eighteenth 
and  nineteenth  centuries,  171  ff.;  of 
peasantry  as  stated  by  Bekhtayev  and 
Schwanebach,  443  f. 

Conditions:  of  colonization  different  in 
Russia  and  United  States,  3  f-",  oi  Ufe 
changed  in  provinces  by  work  of  Zemst- 
vos,  2q6;  of  Ufe  changed  on  account  of 
increase  of  expenditure,  440. 

Conflict:  between  "Greeks"  and  "Ger- 
mans" in  Russia  during  seventeenth 
century,  38;  of  pubUc  opinion  with  gov- 
ernment, 183,  250,  234;  of  Zemstvos 
with  government,  299;  final,  between 
goverruncnt  and  country  begins  in  1902, 
478  ff.     See  also  Clash. 

Confusion  of  terms  "race"  and  "nation," 

31-  _,       . 

Consciousness:  political,  among  Russian 
peasantry,  353. 


ANALYTICAL  INDEX 


569 


Conscripts:  illiteracy  among,  214. 

Consequences  of  Danile\-sky's  theory. 
Slav  opposed  to  European,  59. 

Conser\-ative  party:  since  1863,  284;  \-iew 
of.  on  agricultural  and  financial  crisis, 
and  its  solution,  474  ff. 

Conspiracy  of  Nechayev,  383. 

Constant.  Benjamin:  founder  of  liberal 
movement  in  Russia,  52. 

Constantinople:  fall  of,  in  its  results  upon 
development  of  Russian  church  and 
hierarchy,  74  ff. 

Constitution:  and  .-Mexander  I.,  172  ff  , 
257;  Speranskys  arguments  for  a,  173  f., 
185.  309-  553'  S55'>  public  opinion  and, 
173,  176  f..  182  ff.;  Novoseeltsov's  draft 
of.  174;  favored  by  vast  majority  of 
Moscow  assembly  in  1865,  276;  de- 
manded by  refugees  in  1862  ff..  278; 
plainly  demanded  by  some  of  the  Zemst- 
vos.  304  f..  311.  563;  of  Loris  Melikov. 

312  ff.;  boyars'  political  program  of 
(about  1598).  354  f".  of  Bulgaria  would 
satisfy  demands  of  liberals,  304  f.,  563. 

"Constitutional  assembly  or  a  constitu- 
tion": debate  between  Herzen  and 
Tourguenev,  280  ff.,  320. 

Constitutional:  project  of  1819,  Alexander 
I.  renounces  his.  174,  257;  assembly  de- 
manded by  Herzen  and  Bakoonin,  27S  f., 
3S0;  convention  freely  elected  by  a  gen- 
eral vote,  program  of  Shellyabov's  social- 
istic group,  418. 

Constitutionalism  and  Zemstvos,  294. 

Consultative  assembly:  ifcZemskec  Sobor. 

Continuity:  lack  of,  and  social  tradition. 
19. 

Contrast  between  Muscovite  type  and  pri- 
mary southern  type,  146. 

Co-operation:  agricultural,  program  of 
Russian  socialism,  385. 

Copper  currency:  from  Peter  the  Great  to 
Catherine  II.,  467. 

Corps:  of  gendarmes,  190. 193;  of  nobility, 
founded  by  Empress  Anna  (1732),  250- 

Cossacks:   now  only  trusty  part  of  army, 

Cosmopolitan:  theory  of  nationalism,  ac- 
cording to  Solovyov,  63;  doctrine  of 
social  democracy  in  struggle  with  local 
current  of  Social  Revolutionaries,  493  f. 

Coulanges,  Fustel  de:   on  Mir,  350. 

Council,  national,  or  parhament  in  fifteenth 
century,  149. 

Council:  of  Florence,  75;  of  Moscow 
(1554),  104;  in  1714  condemning 
Tvereclinov  and  his  followers,  109. 

Council  of  State:  established,  173.  309; 
in  Melikov's  draft  of  a  "constitution." 

313  f.;  on  agricultural  and  financial 
crisis  and  its  solution.  473  f. 

Councils:  of  1547  and  iS40  canonizing 
national  saints,  77;    of  1607  condemn- 


ing schismatics,  81,  93;  at  Moscow  in 
1552-54.  104,  no. 

Country  lectures  particularly  difficult  and 
dangerous.  200. 

Court,  or  third,  aristocracy  of  eighteenth 
century,  234  ft". 

Courtiers.  156;  most  dependent  on  will  of 
government.  557. 

Creed:   national  type  of  Russian,  76. 

Crimean  defeat  starts  era  of  "Great  Re- 
forms" of  Alexander  1.,  324. 

Crimes:   increase  of  political.  516. 

Crisis:  Rus.sian,  its  nature  and  urgency  of 
reform,  433-545;  agricultural,  435  ff- 
(and  see  Agrarian  and  Agricultural); 
industrial:  result  of  overprotection, 
459;  and  foreign  market,  464;  reliefs 
proposed.  473  ff.;  financial:  causes,  466; 
schemes  of  relief  proposed,  473  ff. 

Criticisms  and  defense  of  new  culture  by 

liberal  journalists,  45. 
Currency  question,  466  f. 
Currents:     evangelical  and   spiritualistic, 

in  Christian  thought  of  Russia,  92,  111; 

of  political  opinion,  moderate  or  liber.il, 

and  radical  or  socialistic,  222,  560. 

Daily  press:    measures  against,  205. 
Danilevsky:   book  of,  Russia  and  Europe, 

outlet  of  new   nationalistic   current   of 

second  half  of  nineteenth  century,  58; 

formerly  a  Petrashevtsee,  384. 
De  Maistre:   and  De  Bonald,  formulating 

romantic  theory  in  France,  50. 
Decay  of  gentry,  286. 
Deceit  and  violence  of  present  government, 

540. 
December  insurrection  of  1825,  52,  366; 

Laferronnais  on,  184  f.,  187. 
Decembrist  revolution,  176.  184  f.,  254-59. 

Decembrists:  Alexander  I.  and,  176  f., 
254;  Pooshkin  on.  255;  philanthropy 
and,  256;  Southern  Society  of.  led  by 
Pestel,  259 f.;  provincial  assemblies  in 
scheme  of,  310. 

Declaration  of  agreement  (December, 
1904).  between  r.idicals  (revolutionaries) 
and  liberals,  524. 

Decline:  of  aristocracy  of  lineage  in  fif- 
teenth and  sixteenth  centuries.  228;  of 
nobility  and  gentry  since  liberation  of 
I)easants,  237  f. 

Decrease:  in  landholdings  among  peasants 
since  1861,  436;  of  surplus  of  exports 
over  imports,  471  f. 

Defects  in  organization  of  Zemstvos,  288  ff. 

Defenders  of  old  tradition  against  pro- 
gressive public  opinion.  28.  41  ff. 

Defense  of  new  culture  by  liberal  journal- 
ists, 43. 

Deficiencies  of  Russian  Koci;d  mind,  19. 


57° 


RUSSIA  AND  ITS  CRISIS 


Deliberative  assemblies  of  ancient  Russia 
(Zemskee     Sobor):     recommended     by 
Kosheiov,  30Q. 
Delyanov:  decree  of,  restricting  number  of 

Jewish  children  in  schools,  217. 
Demchinskee:     advocating    "federalism" 

and  chambers  in  provinces,  331. 
Democracy:  primitive,  better  developed  in 
earlv  Russia,  136,  149".  and  socialism  in 
England,  Germany,  and  Russia,  336  2-; 
represented  by  "new  generation,"  i.  <"., 
Tourguenev's  "sons,"  375-  384;    social 
{see  Social  democracy.  Socialism). 
Democratic:    spirit   in  early   Russia   and 
United    States,   8;     social    structure   m 
these  countries,  9;    theory  of  Rousseau 
rejected  bv  Catherine  II.,  170;  national- 
ists in  St.  Petersburg  omnipotent  in  early 
sixties,   271  f.;    and   revolutionary   fac- 
tions, attempt  (iSSoff.)  at  reconciling 
the,  429  ff.;   constitution.ahsts,  left  wing 
of  present  liberal  group.  5^9;   autocracy 
advocated     by    Witte    (December     15, 
1904),  533  n.  31- 
Democratism  of  autocracy,  353  f. 
Democratization:    of   aristocracy  of  state 
service  by  Peter  the  Great,  232,  557;  of 
public  opinion,  559  i- 
Democrats  and  agrarian  nobles  at  Moscow 

(1865):   assembly  of.  274  f. 
Demonstration  at  Saratov  (1903),  176  f- 
Demonstrations:  of  university  students  and 
workingmen  (autumn,  1901,  to  spring, 
1902),  504  S. 
Density  of  population  in  European  Russia 

since  Peter  the  Great,  22. 
Department  for  protection,  189. 
Despotism:    Catherine    II. 's    attempt    to 

transform  into  monarchy,  170. 
Determination  of  nationalistic  idea,  30. 
Development:      of     Russia     and     United 
States,  5,  438;    nationa'ism  in  its  three 
stages  of,  3s;    of    Russian   church  and 
hierarchy  through  fall  of  Constantinople, 
74;    of  sectarianism,  83,   01  i.-  100  ff.; 
political,   caused    by   social   differentia- 
tion in  tribal  society,  134;  commerce  and 
war  outward  springs   of   political,  135. 
142  f.;    of  feudal  state,  135  f-.  i43;  01 
Japan  and  Russia  compared,  553. 
Diderot,  25,  172- 

Difference:  in  conditions  of  Russian  and 
American  colonization,  3  f.;  in  re.sults 
of  Russian  and  .\merican  settlements.  9, 
12;  of  nation  and  race.  31;  in  evolution 
of  political  organization  in  western  and 
in  eastern  Europe.  134;  in  liberalism  of 
Russia  caused  by  peculiarities  of  social 
structure,  22s. 
Differences:  in  character  of  settlers  of 
Russia  and  United  States,  and  their 
causes,  10;  in  creed  and  ritual  of  Rus- 
sian and  Greek  churches  early  empha- 
sized, 76. 


Differentiation  of  political  parties  (1863), 

2S3f. 
Disaffection,  political:   a  compelling  force 
toward    reform,    433  f-i     supported    by 
activity  of  revolutionary  parties  (since 
1903),  479  f.;  in  Finland  and  Caucasus, 
502  f. 
Discordant:    public  opinion  loses  hold  on 
the  government,  282;    views  as  to  r61e 
of  Mir,  347. 
Discretionary  power:    legalized  by  "tem- 
porary" regulations,  1S3. 
Disparities   of   political   opinion:     arising 
from  different  schemes  for  emancipation 
of  peasants.  265  f. 
Disproportionate:     increase    of   churches, 
monasteries,   and  clergy,   90;   predomi- 
nance of   nobility  in  Zemstvos  or  pro- 
\-incial   assemblies,    241;     revenue   and 
expense  causes  agrarian  crisis,  430,  439; 
increase  of  taxes  ruins  Russian  peasant, 
442. 
Dissatisfaction:  created  by  reactionary  pol- 
icy of  government.  303;  of  peasants  with 
conditions  of  emancipation,  359. 
Dissociation  from  lower  strata:  nobility's 

and  gentry's  first  outward,  43  f.,  84. 
Dissolution  of  nationalism,  57. 
Distribution       of     revolutionary     leaflets 
(1Q02)   reported  on   by  department  of 
police,  509. 
District:   lectures  particularly  difficult  and 
dangerous.  200;  commanders  again  men 
of  service,  244  f.,  committees  (1902)  on 
agricultural  crisis,  477;   political  import- 
ance of  their  discussion,  478  f.;  liberals 
in,  476  f. 
Divergence:    points  of,  in  declaration  of 
agreement  between  radicals  and  liberals 
(December,  1904),  525  ff- 
"Division    of     land":    starting-point     of 
propaganda      among      peasants,     510; 
"Poogachov    points"  with    respect   to, 
511. 
Doctrine  of  modern  socialism,  362. 
Doctrines   of    Russian  Orthodox   church, 

66. 
Dolgooshin  circle  of  Moscow:  and  "go-to- 

the-people  movement,"  404  f. 
Dolgorookee:     recommends   (i860)    pro- 
vincial assemblies,  310. 
"Domestic  economy":   transition  from,  to 

"exchange  economy,"  439. 
Domiciliary  search,  195. 
Dookhobory:   successors  to  Hleests,  spirit- 
ualistic    sectarians    (about     1770),    92, 
III  ff.,  iiS  f.;  in  Canada,  113.  "9'.  and 
Leo  Tolstoy,  113.  119- 
Doornovo:  secret  messages  of,  to  Delyanov 

on  new  movement  (1898).  324  f. 
Dostoyevsky:   on  national  virtue,  16;  and 
Russian     character,     17;      formerly    a 
Petrashevtsee ,  384. 


ANALYTICAL  INDEX 


571 


Dualism  in  social  life  since  eighteenth 
century.  44. 

Duarchy  of  Tsar  and  patriarch  in  seven- 
teenth century,  85. 

Dvoryane:  or  courtiers,  156. 

Early  Russia:  until  sixteenth  century,  6; 
rural  democracy  in.  8;  local  types  of 
culture  of.  141;  Polish  influence  in.  144. 
179;  popular  beliefs  concerning  trinity 
in.  69  f. 

Earnings  of  migrating  laborers,  north  and 
south.  453  f. 

Eastern:  cinUzation.  essence  of,  55; 
church.  Dean  Stanley  on  general  char- 
acteristics of.  65;  creed,  simplified  and 
materialized  as  Russian  Orthodoxy,  67; 
origin  of  land  grants,  151. 

Eastern  and  Western :  church  in  estimation 
of  Slavophilism,  54;  Europe,  difference 
in  evolution  of  political  organization  in, 
134- 

Eclecticism  of  Russian  theology  of  seven- 
teenth and  eighteenth  centuries.  83. 

Economic:  pxjsition  of  Russian  peasants- 
345;  condition  changed  since  iS6i' 
439  f.;  and  social  reform  questions  un- 
touched in  Paris  agreement  of  Decem- 
ber, 1904.  526  ff. 

"Economism":  of  new  (or  young)  gener- 
ation of  the  nineties  vs.  older  "orthodox" 
Marxism.  484  f .;  gives  way  to  latter,  486. 

Editorial  and  hterary  acti\ity  of  both 
branches  of  Socialist  party.  496  ff.,  509  f. 

Educated  class:  poUtical  power  of  gentry 
as,  248. 

Educated  classes:  indifferent  to  religion 
because  of  break  in  religious  tradition. 
83;  protest  against  religious  intolerance 
and  persecution,  128;  or  people:  sub- 
ject of  debate  between  Herzen  and 
Tourguenev,  280  ff.,  320;  political  ideal- 
ism of,  558. 

Education:  secondary,  under  Peter  the 
Great  and  Catherine  II.,  215. 

Effects  of  overtaxation,  442,  472  f. 

Eighteenth  century:  and  Russian  culture, 
40  f..  45;  nationalism  and  higher  classes, 
40;  and  before,  popular  theology  crude 
and  materialistic  in  belief  and  practices 
during,  70. 

Elimination  of  competition  under  Witte's 
regime,  464  f. 

EUzabeth.  P'mpress:  founder  of  Moscow 
University  (1755),  250. 

Emancipation:  organ  of  Liberal  party 
since  1902,  257,  s'S. 

Emancipation  Act:  real  authors  of,  267. 

"Emancipation  of  Labor  Group,"  425, 
482  f. 

Emancipation  of  peasants:  favored  by 
Catherine  II..  247;  disparities  of  po- 
litical   opinion    arising    from    different 


schemes  for,  265  f.;  and  peasantry,  343; 
anticipations  by  peasants  of.  under  Cath- 
erine II.,  357;  condition  of.  creates  dis- 
satisfaction among  peasantry,  3^9;  and 
first  revolutionary  program.  385  f.;  and 
poUtical  freedom,  gentry's  twofold  pro- 
gram, 558  f. 

Emancipation  of  Russian  church  from 
Greek,  75. 

Embitterment  of  public  opinion  by  gov- 
ernment's postponement  of  political  re- 
form, 173,  176  f..  1S2,  210  f. 

Energy  and  initiative:  lacking  in  character 
of  Russian  colonists,  11. 

Enforcement  of  "self-defense"  by  regu- 
lations 187  f. 

"Enlightened  absolutism"  of  eighteenth 
century,  i6g. 

Entail  system:  lacking  in  Russia,  a  disaster 
in  its  results,  228. 

Era  of  "Great  Reforms":  of  Alexander 
II.,  and  liberalism,  262  ff. 

Eshootin:  circle  of,  394. 

Esprit  dc  corps:  lacking  among  Russian 
nobility  of  seventeenth  and  eighteenth 
centuries,  229  f. 

Essence:  of  Slavophilism,  53;  of  eastern 
civdUzation,  ss- 

Essential  features  of  national  type:  immu- 
tability of  religion  and  autocracy,  131  f. 

Established  church:  decries  rehgious  toler- 
ance, 123. 

Euphemius:  reconstructs  doctrine  of  old 
"Priestless"  about  1770,  99;  and  the 
"Wanderers,"  100;  teaches  Tolstoy's 
Christian  anarchism,  100. 

European:  Russia,  density  of  population 
since  Peter  the  Great.  22;  Slav  opposed 
to,  a  consequence  of  Danilevsky's  theory, 
59- 

Europeanizing  of  Russia  by  Peter  the 
Great,  40. 

Evangelical:  and  spiritual  Christianity, 
transition  from  ritualism  to,  83  ff.,  131; 
and  spiritualistic  currents  of  Christian 
thought,  92,  III. 

Evangelicism  in  Russia:  and  western 
Europe,  102  f;  beginnings  of,  108;  dur- 
ing nineteenth  century,  1 16  ff. 

Evolution:  law  of  religious,  101;  of 
Hleests,  117;  of  Dookhobory  in  nine- 
teenth century,  118;  of  political  organi- 
zation different  in  western  and  in  eastern 
Europe,  134. 

"Exchange  economy":  transition  from 
"domestic  economy"  to,  439. 

Excommunication  of  Count  Leo  Tolstoy, 
86  f. 

Executive:  officers  of  Zemstvo  called 
"Third  Element."  290;  committee  ad- 
dresses Alexander  III.  (March,  1881), 
320;  committee  of  Socialist  Kevolution- 
aries,  416,  419, 


572 


RUSSIA  AND  ITS  CRISIS 


Exile:  administrative,  igs  f. 

Exiles:  great  increase  in  number  of,  during 

ministry  of  Seepyaghin,  196. 
Expenditure:   increase  of,  cause  of  change 

in  condition  of  life,  440. 
Expense   and   revenue,   being    dispropor- 
tionate, cause  agrarian  crisis,  430,  439. 
Expenses  abroad  of  government:    exceed 

profits  from  foreign  imports  enormously, 

472. 
Export  price  of  grain:    constantly  falling 

off  of,  456. 
Exports:   surplus  of,  over  imports  steadily 

decreasing,  471  f. 

Factories:  introduced  by  Peter  the  Great, 

227;    protective  legislation  since  then, 

459- 
Factory  life:  political  disturbances  in,  505. 
Failure:   of  Catherine  II.  to  start  a  repre- 
sentation, 172;  of  agrarian  movement  in 

the  late  seventies,  413. 
Fall  of  Constantinople:    its  results  upon 

development    of    Russian    chvurch    and 

hierarchy,  74  f. 
Famine:  of  1891  starts  new  movement  for 

reform,  324;   of  1902  causing  uprisings, 

508- 
Fate  of  Russian  aborigines,  6. 
Fathers  and  Sons,  by  Tourguenev:   repre- 
senting generations  of  the  forties  and  of 

the  sixties  (new  or  young;  "NihiUsts"), 

373'  384- 
Federalism:  idea  of,  with  Russian  radicals, 

310  f.;    and  chambers  in  the  provinces 

advocated  by  Demchinskee  and  Sharah- 

pov,  331. 
Feeling  and  religion  in  system  of   Slavo- 

pliilism,  54. 
Feudal:     stage   of   political   organization, 

133;  state,  development  of,  13s  f.,  143; 

aristocracy,  135,  149- 
Feudalism:    in  secondary  southern  type, 

149;    its  cause  of  weakness,   150,  229; 

not  existing  in  Muscovite  state,  153. 
Feuerbach,  Ludwig:    originator,  with  St. 

Simon,  of  theory  of  nihiUsm,  364,  384. 
Fichte's:    Speeches  to  the  German  People 

(180S)  and  nationaUstic  idea,  51;    idea 

of  state  indorsed  by  Lassalle  and  Marx, 

338. 
"Fighting  Branch":  of  Social  Democratic 

party,  490  f.;    among  college  students, 

S12. 
Filippov,    Tertius:     on    genuine    type    of 

Russian  culture,  60. 
FiUippitch,  Daneelo,  107. 
Final  decline  of  nobility  and  gentry  since 

Uberation  of  peasants,  237  f. 
Financial     policy:  under    Bunge  (18S3), 

Veeshnegradskee   (1888  ff.),  and   Witte 

(1893  £f.),   444  f.,  466;     its   crisis,   466; 


schemes  proposed  for  relief  of  the  latter- 
473  ff- 

Finland:  and  the  discretionary  powers  of 
governor-general,  183  f.;  disaffection  in, 
502. 

Finnish  "Party  of  Active  Resistance"  in 
1904,  525  f. 

First:  attempt  to  construct  a  nationalistic 
theory,  46;  conflict  of  public  opinion 
with  government,  250,  254;  political 
demonstrations  of  local  assemblies  of 
nobility  (1858-64),  268;  revolutionary 
program  and  emancipation  of  peasants, 
385  f.;  appearance  of  Russian  "masses" 
on  political  stage,  482. 

Flagellants :  see  Hleests. 

Florence:  council  of ,  75. 

Foreign:  origin  of  theory  of  nihilism,  364; 
competition  and  peasantry.  455  f.;  mar- 
kets no  remedy  for  industrial  crisis,  464; 
imports,  and  profits  therefrom  largely 
exceeded  by  governmental  expenses 
abroad,  472;  capital  assisting  Witte  in 
developing  manufacture,  459  f.,  472; 
loans  and  pubUc  debt,  473. 

Foreigners'  influence  upon  Russia  in  mid- 
dle of  seventeenth  century,  36  f. 

Formal  conflict  between  govermnent  and 
country  begins  (1902),  478  £f. 

Formula  for  "official  nationaKsm,"  181. 

Forward  and  backward  movement  in  Rus- 
sian society  of  eighteenth  century,  41,45. 

Fourier's  theory  and  Petrashevtsee,  384. 

Four-storied  representation:  a  scheme  of 
twenty  years  ago,  favored  at  present  by 
many  Uberals,  520. 

Fourth  crusade,  74. 

Franchise:    universal,  questions  touching, 

521  f. 

Free:  speech  excluded  in  people's  lectures, 
199;  public  hbraries  scarce,  201;  coin- 
age of  silver  stopped,  470. 

' '  Free  institutions ' " :  differently  interpreted 
by  liberals  themselves  (1880J,  308  f. 

"Free  love":  Russian,  and  its  true  char- 
acter, 365. 

Free  Russia:  opportunism  of,  condemned 
by  the  Socialist  (1889),  428  f. 

Free  Word:  founded  as  organ  of  Liberal 
party  in  1881,  305. 

Freedom  of  rehgion:  and  Tsar,  123  f.; 
vs.  tradition,  129;  Zemstvos'  appeal  to 
Nicholas  II.  for  more  (1894-95),  325  f. 

Freedom:  political,  in  Japan  and  Russia, 
554  f- 

French  Revolution:  affecting  Russian  con- 
ditions, 26;  and  German  romanticists 
on  nationahstic  idea,  50. 

From  the  Other  Shore:  by  Herzen,  371. 

Frontier:  settlement,  southern,  at  end  of 
sixteenth  century,  7,  356;  service  of 
early  colonists,  10. 


ANALYTICAL  INDEX 


573 


Future:  Russian  south  "promised  land" 
of  Russian.  146. 

Gand\ik:  i.  c,  \Mutc  Sea,  Beormasat,  141. 

General:  assembly  of  deputies  and  Cath- 
erine II.,  171  f.,  237;  vote  and  one- 
chamber  system  demanded  by  liberals 
of  the  "Alliance"  (1880).  311;  "consti- 
tutional convention"  freely  elected  by  a 
general  vote,  program  of  Shellyabov's 
socialistic  group.  418;  Jewish  W'orkinp- 
men's  Alliance  for  Russia  and  Poland 
(.see  Jewish  Bund). 

"General  Land  Partition"  party  (1879): 
conservative  wing  of  "Land  and  Lib- 
erty" party.  421  f  ;  "pure  populism"  of, 
evolves  into  "pure  socialism"  vs.  bour- 
geois strivings  of  " People "s  Will"  party, 
422  f. 

Gentry:  first  outward  dissociation  of, 
from  lower  strata.  43  f.,  84;  social  his- 
tory of.  227-45;  nobility  of  state  serxice 
organized  by  John  IV.  against  aris- 
tocracy. 22g;  military  service  of.  231; 
political  intluence  of,  235;  transforma- 
tion of.  into  a  privileged  class  by  Cath- 
erine II.,  237;  final  decline  of.  since 
emancipation  of  peasants.  237  f.;  lacks 
in  political  power  as  a  social  group,  246, 
557;  political  power  of,  as  educated 
class,  representing  public  opinion,  248; 
struggle  of.  for  political  liberty.  248  f.; 
freed  by  Catherine  II.  from  compulsory 
military  service.  357  f.;  twofold  program 
of :  emancipation  of  peasants  and  pohti- 
cal  freedom,  558  f. 

German:  quarter  in  Moscow,  37;  roman- 
ticists on  nationalistic  idea,  50;  Refor- 
mation and  its  influence  in  Russia,  104. 
See  also  Greeks. 

Germany:  socialism  and  democracy  in, 
337- 

Gesitli,  55. 

Glebae  ascripli:  peasants  become  (1648), 
337- 

Godoonov.  Boris:  founder  of  Russian  sec- 
tarianism, 100,  354,  356. 

Gold:  customs  of  1876.  469;  and  prohib- 
itive tariff  of  1 89 1,  and  their  conse- 
quences, 459  f.,  471  ff.;  currency  intro- 
duced (189s),  466,  469  f.;  reserve  kept 
up  with  great  difficulty,  471. 

Golohvastov:  on  "Charter  of  Nobility," 
27S- 

Goloveen:  and  cen.sorship  of  press,  208  f. 

"Good-for-nothing-men":   see  Shalopoots. 

Goorko:  on  agricultural  and  financial 
crisis,  and  its  solution,  474  ff. 

Gopon.  Father  George:  Russian  La.ssalle, 
536  ff. 

"Go-to-the-people  movement"  of  1873-74, 
383,  403(1  ;  preparation  of,  404  f.;  epi- 
demic character  of,  405-7;  failure  of, 
407  f.;  lessons  from,  410. 


Government:  central  .Tnd  colonists.  10, 
140;  in  conflict  with  public  opinion,  180, 
183.  250-54;  and  with  Zem.stvos.  294, 
299  ff.;  newspaper.  209;  attempts  to 
include  aristocracy  in  its  system  of  self- 
defense,  230;  creates  general  dissatis- 
faction by  its  reactionary  policy.  303; 
asks  help  against  revolutionists  (1878),' 
303;  memorialized  by  Zemstvos,  some 
demanding  oisenly  a  constitution.  304  f., 
311,  563;  in  present  struggle  with  liber- 
alism, 328  ff.;  in  formal  conflict  ipvith 
country  since  1902,  478  ff.;  now  as  vacil- 
lating and  irresolute  as  ever.  539;  nihil- 
ism present  poUcy  of  authorities,  540.     ' 

Governors:  powers  of,  over  Zemstvos,  300. 

Gradual  approximation  of  radical  and 
Uberal  programs,  523  f. 

Grain:  only  pea.sants'  product  to  sell, 
455;  raising  of,  unprofitable  owing  to 
foreign  competition,  455  f. 

Granovsky:  aiding  Herzen's  views,  372. 

Great  Russian:  opposed  to  Ru.ssian  (Mos- 
cow circle),  60. 

Great  Russian,  390;  quotation  from,  386. 

Great  Russians:  especially  Moscow,  type 
of  Russian  culture  for  Grigoryev,  Filip- 
pov,  and  others,  60. 

Greek  and  Russian  churches:  historical 
antagonism  between,  73;  differences  in 
creed  of,  early  emphasized,  76. 

Greek  religious  tradition  reintroduced  in 
seventeenth  century,  79. 

Greeks  and  Germans:  in  conflict  in  Russia 
during  seventeenth  century.  38;  influ- 
ence of,  upon  nationalism  contrasted,  37. 

Grellet,  Stephen:  on  Molokanee,  in  his 
Memoirs,  115. 

Grigoryev:    on  genuine  type  of  Russian 

culture,  60. 

"Group  for  Liberation  of  Labor"  (1883): 
under  Axebod  and  Plehanov,  425,  487; 
adopts  La\Tov's  views,  425. 

Growth:  material,  of  Russia,  22;  of  civil- 
izing ideas,  23;  of  sectarianism  and  per- 
secution, 123;  of  Russian  manufacture, 
459  f. 

Harvest  returns:  comparative  table  of,  453. 

Haven,  Peter:  on  Russian  social  life  of 
eighteenth  century,  41. 

Haxthausen,  Baron:  and  Mir  (1880),  349. 

Hegel's:  Philosophy  of  History  and 
nationalistic  idea,  51,  261;  idea  of  state, 
indorsed  by  Lassalle  and  Marx,  338. 

Hercdes  and  originarii,  138. 

Herzcn,  320;  and  Katkov,  274;  demands 
a  con.slitutional  assembly  (1862  ff.), 
278  f.,  380;  debate  of,  with  Tourguenev, 
280  ff.,  320;  a  leader  of  Russian  social- 
ism, 363;  nihilism  of,  363  f.;  socialism 
of,  365  f.;  te.aches  Russian  village  com- 
mune to  be  germ  of  socialistic  society. 


574 


RUSSIA  AND  ITS  CRISIS 


367  ff.;  influenced  by  novel  Arminius, 
368;  opposed  by  Marx  because  of  his 
Panslavism.  371,  382  f.;  founds  the 
Bell  as  his  organ,  372.  383;  his  From  the 
Other  Shore  and  Letters  from  France  and 
Italy,  37I-,  socialistic  program  of,  372; 
and  public  opinion  in  Russia,  371  f.; 
view  of,  aided  by  Belinsky  and  Granov- 
sky.  372;  criticism  of,  of  "new  genera- 
tion," 377;  rejoinder  to,  by  Bakoonin, 
378;  advocates  peaceful  opposition  as 
against  Bakoonin,  379  ff-",  and  Bakoonin, 
381;  on  "Land  and  Liberty"  organiza- 
tion (1862),  390. 

Hierarchv:  of  Russian  church  since  fall 
of  Constantinople,  74  f-'.  and  Tsars  of 
seventeenth  century,  84  ff.;  re-estab- 
lished among  "acknowledging-priests" 
Old-believers,  94;  "Austrian,"  in  Rus- 
sia, 95- 

Higher  classes:  and  nationalism  of  eight- 
eenth century,  40. 

"Historical  materialism  of  Marx:"  adopted 
by  new  generation  of  the  nineties,  483  f. 

Historical  Russian  tradition,  3-29.  63.  547- 

History  of  Russia  changing  rapidly  and 
essentially.  546. 

Hleests  (Flagellants):  spiritualistic  sec- 
tarians (about  1690),  92,  106,  117  f. 

Hobbes,  170;  his  absolutism.  552. 

Holy  Synod:  anti-canonic  since  Peter 
the  Great,  86;  attempts  to  supplant 
Zemstvo  schools  by  parish  schools, 
212  f.;  more  intolerant  after  manifesto 
of  December  16,  1904,  534  f- 

Home  market :  not  to  be  expanded  without 
slackening  protectionism,  465. 

Homyakov:  influencing  Dean  Stanley's 
conception  of  Eastern  church,  65. 

House  communion:  and  tribal  organiza- 
tion in  early  Russia,  133,  136  f. 

Human  and  horse  power  in  rural  districts 
of  southern  Russia,  450  ff. 

Hypocrisy:  and  Russian  character,  15. 

"Icons":     fetish    of   Russian   peasant   of 

eighteenth  century,  69. 
Idea:    nationahstic,  30-64;    Uberal,  221- 

333;   sociaUstic,  334-432;   of  federaUsm 

with  Russian  radicals,  310.  3n- 
Ideas  of   religious  and   political  freedom 

previous  to  French  Revolution,  26. 
Ignatyev:  period  of  transition  of,  316. 
"Ill-intentioned"  and  "well-intentioned," 

196. 
Illiteracy  among  conscripts,  214. 
Imitators    and    reactionaries    in    Russian 

society  of  eighteenth  century,  41. 
Immediate  reforms  of  government  not  in 

sight,  433. 
Immigration:  drift  of  Russian,  7. 


Immutability:   of  religion  one  of  the  two 
essential   features   of   national   type   of 
Russia,  131  f.  {but   see   547  f.);    theory 
of  national,  prevents  any  form  of  pro- 
gress on  part  of  government,  539;  theory 
itself  a  product  of  change,  546  f. 
Imports:  surplus  of  exports  over,  steadily 
decreasing,  471  f.;    foreign,  do  not  pay 
governmental  expenses  abroad,  472. 
Impoverishment  of  peasantry  of  southern 
Russia  through  three-field  system  and 
poor  tillage,  440,  450. 
Imprisonment  of  political  suspects,  196. 
Income    of    peasants,    417;     different    in 

northern  and  southern  Russia,  448. 
Increase:   of  expenditure  cause  of  change 
in    condition   of    life,    440;     of    present 
police    persecutions,    514;     of    poUtical 
crimes,  516. 
Indifference  in  religion    among    educated 

cla.sses,  83. 
Individual  belief  and  Orthodoxy,  125  f. 
Individualism    of     socialism   in   English- 
speaking  countries,  336. 
Individualistic    tendencies    in    Mir,    and 

agrarian  legislation,  350. 
Indorsement    by   all    classes  and    masses 
of  "Petition  of  Rights"  of  November 
19-21,  1904,  530  f. 
Industrial  crisis:  a  result  of  overprotection, 

459;   and  foreign  market,  464. 
Industries:  protection  of,  a  most  important 
cause  of  agricultural  crisis,  446  ft.,  459. 
Inefficiency  of  whole  system  of  oppression, 

219. 
Influence:  of  foreigners  upon  Russia  in 
middle  of  seventeenth  century,  36  f.;  of 
schismatics  of  seventeenth  century  with 
peasantry,  90  f  ;  of  Paulikianism,  103; 
of  pre-Reformation  ideas  in  Russia,  103. 
Initiative;  lacking  in  character  of  Russian 

colonists,  II. 
Inner   migrations    of    peasants  in   search 

of  employment,  437,  452. 
Instinctive  feeUng:    nationalistic  idea  as 

an,  35. 
Insufficient:   number  of  .schools,  214;   size 
of  allotments  for  peasants  of  southern 
Russia    from   1861  on,  449:    character 
of  "temporary  measures"  of  the  eighties, 
515- 
Intellectual:   Russian  liberaUsm  not  bour- 
geois, but,  226. 
"Intellectuals":      Russian,   in     time     of 
Nicholas  I.  and  Alexander  II.,  262,  2S1; 
task  of,  according  to  LavTov,  401;   and 
socialist    propaganda,  480;    and  work- 
ingmcn  to  be  helpers  for  social  liberation 
of  peasants,  according  to  Social  Revolu- 
tionaiies'     party,    492;      found     Social 
Democratic  Labor  party  in  1898  ff.,  496- 
Intermediators:    between  government  and 
revolutionaries,  role  of  liberals  as,  518, 


ANALYTICAL  INDEX 


575 


"International."  304;  Russian  branch  of, 
founded  by  Xechuyev,  396  f. 

Intolerance:  and  its  source:  Russianiza- 
tion,  126;  in  relifiion  decried  by  edu- 
cated classes.  128  f.;  of  Holy  'Synod 
increased  after  manifesto  of  December 
26,  1904,  534  f. 

Introduction:  of  military  tenure,  151, 
154  IT.;  of  special  "state  police"  by 
Nicholas  I.,  185. 

Irreconcilable  breach  between  national- 
ism and  radicalism  since  era  of  "Great 
Reforms,"  366. 

Irritation,  not  pacification,  result  of  mani- 
festo of  December  26,  1904,  535. 

Isgoccs:  or  liberated  slaves,  138. 

Janitors:  spies  and,  193;  officials  of 
government,  532. 

Japan:  development  of,  and  that  of 
Russia  compared,  S53  f.'i  political  free- 
dom of,  and  that  of  Russia,  554. 

Japanophilism,  554. 

Jewish  Bund:  September,  1897.  secedes 
from  United  Social  Democratic  party, 
489;  actinty  of.  500  f. ;  work  of.  among 
soldiers.  512;    Pahlen  on,  501  f. 

Jews:  children  of.  restricted  in  number  in 
public  schools,  217. 

John  III.:  and  national  unification,  32; 
boyars  and  sons  of  boyars  under.  157, 
229;  and  autocracy,  160;  military- 
national  organization  of,  148,  156; 
forms  class  of  military  men  of  service, 
232. 

John  IV.,  167,  353  f.;  interest  of,  in  reli- 
gious questions.  105;  military  and  na- 
tional organization  of,  148,  156;  takes 
title  of  Tsar.  164;  treatment  of  heredi- 
tary princes  and  high  vassals.  229; 
crushes  ancient  aristocracy  of  lineage, 
230.  557;  standing  armies  since.  231; 
and  democratism  of  autocracy,  354  f. 

Journalists:  of  eighteenth  century  and 
new  culture,  45;  and  Catherine  II.,  252. 

Journey  from  Petersburg  to  Moscow  (1790): 
by  Radceschev,  26,  253. 

Judaizers:  evangelical  sectarians,  92,  103, 
110. 

Karakozov:  attempts  to  as.sassinate  Tsar, 
April  16,  1866,  394. 

Katkov,  274,  284;  organ  of,  Moscow  News, 
287.  319;  on  unsatisfactory  condition  of 
Zemstvos  in  1870,  302. 

Kavailin  and  Millyoutin:  directing  nation- 
alistic democratic  affairs  in  early  sixties, 
272  f.;  on  work  of  Zemstvos,  293. 

Kceyev,  68,  74  80;  early  center  of  military 
defense,  143,  163. 

Kooropatkin:  August.  1000,  on  political 
agitation  among  soldiers,  512  n.  19. 

Koshelov.  the  Slavophil  C1880):  on  "free 
institulioub,"  and  recommends  Zemskec 


Sobor,  309;  agrees  to  Melikov's  "con- 
stitution," 312. 

Kovalevsky.  Sophie:  Memoirs,  365. 

Kreeshanich,  Georges:  on  Politics,  38. 

Kreutzer  Sonata:  of  Leo  Tolstoy,  365. 

Kropotkin:  Memoirs  of  a  Revolutionist, 
on  "go-to-the-people  movement"  of 
1873-74,  404- 

Kuhlmann,  Quirinus:  auto-da-fe  of,  24. 

Labor  party:  launching  of,  480. 

Lack  of  continuity  and  social  tradition,  19. 

Laferronnais:  on  December  mutiny,  i.S4  tT. 

Laity:  at  end  of  seventeenth  and  eight- 
eenth centuries,  83. 

"Land  and  Liberty"  organization:  pre- 
paring agrarian  uprising  (1862),  390  f.; 
or  Populist  party,  organized  (1876),  and 
its  progr;mi,  41 1 ;  tiissensions  within,  418. 

Land  for  sale  and  for  rent  for  agric\iltural 
purposes  insufficient  and  dear,  450. 

Land  grants:  eastern  origin  of,  151; 
under  Catherine  II.  and  Paul,  235. 

Land-dinsion:  starting-point  of  propa- 
ganda among  peasants,  510. 

Landed  property:  a  consequence  rather 
than  a  source  of  social  power,  227  f.; 
and  nobility  in  nineteenth  century,  230  f. 

Landed  proprietors  clash  with  demo- 
cratic nationalists  on  question  of  Mir, 
271. 

Landholdings  of  peasants  decreased  since 
1861,  436. 

Landlord:  Russian,  of  eighteenth  century, 
40. 

Landlords:  aristocracy's  sacrifice  of  peas- 
antry in  sixteenth  century  to  the,  355  f. 

Language:  Russian,  constantly  changing 
and  wavering,  19. 

Lanin:  on  Russian  Characteristics,  13. 

"Latin  heresy":  Bashkin  condemned  for, 
by  council  of  bishops  in  Moscow  (1554), 
104. 

La\Tists:  or  pure  socialists,  object  to 
further  propaganda  among  peasants, 
408  f.,  422  f. 

Lavrov:  new  theory  of,  on  social  revohi- 
tion,  398  ff.;  advocates  social  propa- 
ganda 399",  opinion  of.  on  intelkctuais 
task.  401;  views  of,  adopted  by  "Group 
for  the  Liberation  of  Labor,"  425. 

Law:  of  religious  evolution.  loi;  of 
nature  as  basis  of  autocracy,  168. 

Legal:  origin  of  autocracy,  164;  formula  of, 
168;   Marxism  (sec  Miu-xism). 

Legalization  of  arbitrary  rule  by  statutes, 
204. 

Lcontiev:  on  Slavic  and  Russi.-in  culture, 
60  f.;    reactionary  nationalism  of,  O2. 

Letters  from  France  and  Italy:  of  Ilerzen, 
371- 


576 


RUSSIA  AND  ITS  CRISIS 


Levitic  caste:   formed  by  clergy,  88. 
Lholas  of  Russian  law,  140. 
Liberal:   movement  in  Russia  founrlcd  by 
Constant,  52;    idea,  221-333;    political 
opinion,  two  steps  in  history  of,  248  tf.', 
party  changing  in  its  social  composition 
by  decay  of  gentry,  286;    party  joined 
by  new  men  of  liberal  professions,  286; 
propaganda  among  Zemstvos  and  Mr. 
Witte's  report,  305  f.;   party  organ.  Free 
Word,     305;      movement     revived     in 
Zemstvos   at   death   of   Alexander   III. 
(1894),  325;   groups'  schemes  of  twerrty 
years  ago  abandoned  by  party,  except 
two,  520;    program,  563. 
Liberalism:   in  western  Europe,  especially 
England,  and  in  Russia.  223;  in  Russia 
as  compared  with  English  and  German, 
224,  249.  253;   of  Russia  not  bourgeois, 
but  intellectual,  226;   and  era  of  "Great 
Reforms"    of    Alexander    II.,    262  ff.; 
after   emancipation,    285  ff.;     Zemstvos 
headquarters    of,    285,    2S8  f.;     in    its 
present  struggle  with  government.  328  £f.; 
and  autocracy  as  viewed  by  Witte.  332; 
powerless  in  Russia,  according  to  Shelly- 
abov,  417;  present  political  role  of.  518; 
program  of,  sipf.:  organized,  sipf-.;  .one 
of  the  two  currents  of  public  opinion, 
222,  560;   view  of,  on  agricultural  and 
financial  crisis  and  its  solution,  476  f. 
Liberals:     advocate    forward    movement 
since    eighteenth    century.    46;     disap- 
pointed   by    work    of    Zemstvos,    295; 
would  be  satisfied  with  constitution  like 
that  of  Bulgaria,  304  f-.  563;   and  Lons 
Melikov  (1880).  303;    of  Moscow  and 
their   memorandum   of   grievances  and 
desiderata.  306  f.;    political  schemes  of 
(1880),  309;  of  "Alliance"  demand  one- 
chamber  system  and  general  vote,  311; 
answer  in  an  open  letter  Tsar  Nicholas 
II. 's  speech  of  January  17  (29).  1895. 
327;   in  district  committees  on  agricul- 
tural and  financial  crisis  and  its  solution, 
476  f  ;    favor   now,  to   a  large  extent, 
four -storied  representation,  a  scheme  of 
twenty  years  ago.  520;   and  declaration 
of  their  agreement  with  radicals.  Decem- 
ber,  1904,  524;    as  intermediators  be- 
tween government  and  revolutionaries, 
518. 
Liberation  of  serfs:  and  decline  of  nobility 

and  gentry,  237  f- 
Libraries:     only    few    free    public.    201; 
village,   201,  478;   people's,  and  books 
perrnitted  and  forbidden  in,  202  f. 
Literary  acti^^tv:   during  last  ten  years  of 
Nicholas  I.  and  first  ten  of  Alexander 
II.,  287. 
Local:    aristocracy  and   its  rise,   134  ff-; 
tvpe    of    early    Russian    culture,    141; 
assembhes  of  nobility  and  first  political 
demonstrations  (1858-64),  268;    auton- 
omv   and   autocracy,    316;     conditions, 
of  agriculture   in   southwestern,   south- 
central,  and  northwestern  Russia,  437; 


assemblies  called  together  (1902)  on 
agricultural  crisis,  476  f.;  current  of 
Social  Revolutionaries  in  struggle  with 
cosmopolitan  doctrine  of  Social  Democ- 
racy, 493  f. 

Lopooheens:    in  eighteenth  century,  230. 

Ix)w  producti\'ity  of  soil:  one  cause  of 
agrarian  crisis,  456;  opinions  as  to 
proper  relief  for,  457. 

Lower  classes  in  Russia:  and  their  aspira- 
tions, 342. 

Magna  Charta  of  Empress  Anna,  236. 
Maine,  Henry  James  Sumner:    and  Mir 

349- 

Manifesto  of  Tsar:  upholding  autocracy, 

April  27  (May  11),  1881,  315;  of  March 

II,  1903,  and  December  26, 1004,  532  ff., 

542;   of  March  4,  1905,  543  ff. 

Manufactures:  growth  of  Russian,  4Sof., 

472. 
Marshals  of  nobility:  created  by  Catherine 
II.,   preside  over   Zemstvos,   300,   310; 
call  together  local  assemblies  on  agri- 
cultural crisis  of  1902,  476  f. 
Marriage  question:   among  Priestless  Old- 
believers,  98. 
Mart>TS  to  political  freedom,  172  f. 
Marx:    opponent   of   Herzen   because   of 
latter's  Pansla\-ism,  371,  382  f.;  Rus.sian 
socialism  drifting  to  point  of  view  of 
from  that  of  Bakoonin,  341;  "scientific' 
socialism  of,  taking  place  of  "Utopian' 
socialism  or  anarchism  of  Bakoonin.  347 
theory  of,    ascendant    in   the   seventies 
398  f.;      "historical     materialism"     of 
adopted    by    new    generation    of    the 
nineties.  483  f.;  doctrine  of,  as  revised 
by  Bernstein,  defeated,  487- 
Marxism:   ultimate  end  of  pure  populism, 
424;    as  taught  by  A.xelrod,  423  f-;.  by 
Plehanov,  426  f.;  legal  or  "economist." 
another  name  for  "revisionism"  in  the 
nineties,     487  f.     See     also     Orthodox 
Marxism. 
Masonic  lodges:   forbidden  (1819),  258. 
Masonry  of  Russia:    aids  philanthropists 
under,  and  is  persecuted  by,  Catherine 
II.,  252  f. 
Massacre  of  St.  Petersburg.  January  22, 

1905,  505  f- 
Masses:   Russian,  appear  for  first  time  on 

political  stage,  482. 
Material:  growth  of  Russia,  22;  want  and 
political    disaffection    impelling    forces 
toward  reform,  433  f. 
Measures:    to  check  political  opposition, 
183;  against  early  press  and  periodicals, 
205;    of  repression  after  December  26, 
1904,  534- 
Melikov.  Loris:   and  liberals  (1880),  306; 

"constitution"  of,  312. 
"Men  of  God":   jce  Hleests. 


ANALYTICAL  INDEX 


577 


Men  of  (niilitary)  service.  153  fT.,  355. 

"Men  of  senice":  lower  middle  class  of. 
favored  hy  Peter  the  Great  against 
nobility  both  of  birth  and  of  state  service, 
232. 

"Men  of  mixed  (»'.  c,  lower)  ranks."  or 
Raznochinlsee:  true  leaders  of  socialism, 
and  their  intiuence.  375  f.;  criticised  by 
Herzen,  378;   in  Russia,  ,i;6o. 

Messianism  of  nationalistic  idea.  35.  57. 

Mettemich:   and  Alexander  I.,  174.  257. 

Migration  of  peasants:  in  search  of  em- 
ployment north  and  south,  437,  452; 
and  their  earnings,  453  f. 

Mihaylovsky:  and  "repentant  noblemen," 
376. 

Military:  stage  of  political  organization, 
133;  center  of  defense  in  early  Russia, 
143.  163;  men  of  serWce  formed  into  a 
class  by  John  III.,  232;  national  organi- 
zation of  John  III.  and  John  IV.,  148, 
156;  tenure,  introduction  of,  151, 154  ff.; 
ser\ice  and  gentry.  231.  3S7  f',  defense 
and  state  colonization  origin  of  towns, 
226. 

"Milk-Drinkers":  i««  Molokanee. 

^Iil!youtin :  one  of  real  authors  of  Emanci- 
pation Act,  267;  considered  a  "trim- 
mer" by  radicals,  388.  See  also 
Kavailin. 

Mir  =  village  community:  democratic  na- 
tionalists and  landed  proprietors  clash 
on  question  of.  271;  nature  and  effect  of. 
on  social  life.  343;  "rural  commander" 
of,  344;  discordant  views  as  to  role  of, 
347  ff.;  origin  of,  340;  indiridualistic 
tendencies  in,  and  agrarian  legislation, 
350- 

Mimee:  on  Zemstvos'  appeal  to  Tsar 
Nicholas  II.,  326. 

Moderate  (or  liberal)  and  radical  (or 
socialistic)  currents  of  political  opinion, 
222. 

Modem  socialism:  its  doctrine,  364. 

Molokanee:  evangelistic  sectarians  (about 
17Q0),  92.  iiiff.,  120  ff.  See  also 
Alien  and  Grellet. 

Monarchy,  Russian:  anti-aristocratic, 
military,  not  really  democratic.  158; 
Catherine  II.  attempts  to  transform 
"despotism"  into  "monarchy,"   170. 

Monasteries:  disproportionate  increase  of, 
over  Orthodox  population,  90. 

Monetary  history  of  Russia  and  United 
States  .'466  ff- 

Monomach.  Vladeemir:  and  Constantine, 
163;  insij;nia  of,  164,  182. 

Montesquieu:  on  nationalistic  theory,  47; 
principal  political  teacher  of  Catherine 
II.,  170;  theory  of,  of  media-val  mon- 
archy limited  by  "intermediate  power," 
170  f..  552. 

Morozov,  230. 


Moscow:  in  1689,  23;  and  foreigners 
about  middle  of  seventeenth  century, 
36  f..  106;  seat  of  romantic  movement 
of  nineteenth  century.  52;  conservatives 
opposed  to  Great  Russian,  60;  genuine 
type  of  Russian  culture,  according  to 
Grigoryev  and  Filippov,  60  f.;  called 
"third  Rome,"  75.  162;  seat  of  Ru.ssian 
patriarch.  79;  and  sixteenth  century 
Reformation,  104;  seat  of  academv  for 
theological  studies  since  1687,  108; 
couiicils  at,  in  15^2-54,  104.  no;  Uni- 
versity of,  founded  by  Kmpress  Elizabeth 
•n  i7.'i5'  250;  assembly  of  agrarian 
nobles  and  democrats  in  1865.  274  ff. 

Moscow  N'e-u.'s:  Katkov's  organ.  287.  319. 

Muscovite:  government  protecting  prairie 
settlers,  6;  Pickwickians  and  genuine 
Russian  type,  61;  and  primary  southern 
Russian  type,  145  f.;  military  system  of 
Byzantine  oriental  origin.  150  f.,  229; 
state  never  had  feudalism  to  contend 
with,  153;  government  ends  (1648) 
rebellion  of  peasants  against  their  lords, 
357;  princes  form  autocracy  at  end  of 
fifteenth  century,  550. 

Muzzling  of  press,  205  ff.,  534. 

Nareeshkins:  in  eighteenth  century,  230. 

Nation  and  race:  two  different  terms,  31; 
according  to  romantic  idea,  49. 

National:  virtue,  16;  um"formity  and  its 
origin.  31;  unification  and  John  III.,  32; 
self-consciousness  and  self-criticism  be- 
ginning. 33;  character  according  to  Rus- 
sian view,  76;  saints.  77;  council  in  fif- 
teenth century.  149;  paper  or  "assig- 
nats,"  467:  immutability,  theory  of, 
131  f.,  547  f.;  prevents  any  reform  pro- 
gram on  part  of  government,  539. 

National  religion :  of  Saint  Russia  of  seven- 
teenth century,  72;  exalted  above  orien- 
tal, 73;  type  of,  worked  out,  74;  con- 
demned by  Neekon,  85. 

National  type:  and  its  chief  features.  13, 
20  f.,  131  f..  547;  a  social  product,  31, 
547;  of  Russian  creed,  76;  of  relision, 
78;  of  church  and  Neekon 's  reaction,  79. 

Nationalism:  self-annihilation  of,  34  f.; 
three  stages  of  development  of,  35; 
grows  conscious.  35  f.;  critical,  37; 
becomes  messianic  and  cosmopolitan, 
35,  57;  after  Peter  the  Great,  40; 
during  eighteenth  century,  40;  Cath- 
erine II. 's  theory  of.  47;  reconstruction 
of,  by  Danilevsky.  58;  Solovyov's  cos- 
mopolitan theory  of,  63;  and  tradition, 
64,  547;  averse  to  political  lif)eration, 
260;  and  radicalism  irreconcilable  since 
era  of  "(jreat  Reforms,"  366.  See  also 
Official  nationalism. 

Nationalistic  democrats:  in  St.  Pctcrsljurg 
omnipotent  in  early  sixties,  271  ff. 

Nationalistic  idea,  30-64;  as  an  instinc- 
tive feeling,  35;   assertive  and  arrogant 


578 


RUSSIA  AND  ITS  CRISIS 


stage  of,  36;  French  and  German 
romanticists  on,  50;  policy  taught  by 
Kreeshanich,  38. 
Nationahstic  theory:  first  attempts  to  con- 
struct a,  46;  Bodin  on,  47;  creation  of 
nineteenth  century,  48;  based  on 
western  European  philosophic  thought, 
51;  under  Nicholas  I.,  180,  260. 
Nationality:  one  of  the  trinity  of  Russian 

official  nationalism,  182. 
" NationaUzation  of  land":   in  program  of 

social  democracy  (1900),  493. 
Natural  law:  as  basis  of  autocracy,  168. 
Nechayev:    a  fanatic,  carries  Bakoonin's 
theories  to  the  extreme,  his  conspiracy, 
383;    Jacobinism  of,  394  ff-;    circle  of, 
394;  program  of,  395  f.;  founds  Russian 
branch    of    "International,"     396  f.; 
reaction  against,  in  favor  of  Marxism, 
398  ff.,  40S- 
Neekon:  "friend  of  the  Greeks,"  patriarch 
of   Russia,   and   his   reform,    79;     and 
"Old-believers,"  80. 
Negative  traits  of  Russian  character,  14. 
New  culture:  mark  of  social  distinction,  43; 
criticised  and  defended  by  liberal  jour- 
nalists in  eighteenth  century,  45. 
"New  generation":  of  Tourguenev's  time, 
representing   democracy  of  the   sixties, 
375.   384;    Herzen's   criticism   of,   377; 
of  the  nineties  vs.  populist  teachings,  485; 
adopts  Marx's  "historical  materiaUsm," 
483  f- 
New  ideas:  and  Catherine  II.,  26,  45,  47, 

252  f. 
New  movements  for  reform:  started  after 

public  disasters,  324  f. 
New  vs.  ancient  nobility  in  seventeenth 

century,  229. 
Newspapers:    supported   by   government, 
209;   and  periodicals  permitted  and  for- 
bidden in  people's  Ubraries,  203.     See 
also  Press. 
Nicholas  I.,  180, 185, 193;  and  censorship, 
204;   and  "intellectuals,"    262;   literary 
activity  during  last  ten  years  of,  287. 
Nicholas   II.:    and   appeal   of   Zemstvos 
(1894-95)    for    more    freedom,    325  f.; 
answer  of,  326  f.;  determined  to  uphold 
autocracy,  327;  against  peasants'  notion 
of  a  "general  land  partition,"  510  n.  18; 
answers  "Petition  of  Rights"  of  Novem- 
ber    19-21,     1904,     by     manifesto     of 
December  26,  1904,  533. 
"Nihilism":   an  inadequate  term  for  char- 
acterization of  Russian  sociaUsm,  334; 
of  Herzen,  363  f.;   theory  of,  of  foreign 
origin,  364,  384. 

Nineteenth  century:  Russia  at  end  of,  27; 
creates  nationalistic  theory,  48;  evan- 
gelicism  in  Russia  during,  116  ff. 

No  free  speech  in  people's  lectures,  199- 


Nobility:  first  outward  dissociation  of, 
from  lower  strata,  43  f.,  84;  charter 
granted  to,  by  Catherine  II.  and  con- 
firmed by  Alexander  I.,  171,  275; 
social  history  of.  227-45;  of  state  service 
(second  aristocracy)  in  seventeenth  and 
eighteenth  centuries  lack  corporate 
spirit,  229  f.;  final  decline  of,  since 
liberation  of  peasants,  237  f.;  in  nine- 
teenth century,  239  f.;  bank  founded 
for  benefit  of,  240;  disproportionate  pre- 
dominance of,  in  Zemstvos  or  provincial 
assemblies,  241;  corps  of,  founded  by 
Empress  Anna  (1732),  250;  first  politi- 
cal demonstrations  of  local  assemblies  of 
(1858-64),  268;  assembly  of,  at  Mo.scow 
(1865),  274  f.  See  also  Marshals  of 
nobility. 

Nonconformists:  and  authorities  of  state 
and  church,  124. 

"Northern  AUiance  of  Workingmen" 
(1879):  formed  in  accordance  with 
Tkachov's  theories,  414. 

Northern  peasant  type,  144;  secondary 
northern  type,  145. 

Northern  Russian  peasants:  source  of 
income  of,  chiefly  from  subsidiary  em- 
ployment, 448;  inner  migrations  of,  453. 

"North-Russian  Society  of  Land  and 
Liberty"  (1880):    program  of,  424  f- 

Novekov:  the  journalist,  45;  imprisoned 
by  Catherine  II.,  253,  257. 

Novgorod  and  Pskov:  seats  of  fifteenth 
century  reformation,  103;  centers  of 
northern  Russian  type,  144. 

Novoseeltsov:  draft  of,  of  constitution,  174. 

Ofi&cial  church:  of  seventeenth  and  eight- 
eenth centuries,  and   its   theology,  82; 

separation  of  popular  faith  from,  79. 
"Official  nationalism":  and  Slavophilism, 

180  ff.,  239,  280;   seventy  years  ago  and 

now,  539. 
Ognishchanin:     chief    of    Russian    house 

communion,  137. 
Ohrana:  or  "Department  for  Protection," 

189. 
Oka  River,  6,  13. 
"Old-believers:"    and  Patriarch  Neekon, 

80;   historical  sketch  of,  92  ff. 
Old-Russian  States  General:  embodiment 

of    "right    of    opinion,"   according    to 

Slavophils,  56. 
Old  tradition:  break  of,  29;  defenders  of, 

41,46. 
Ole:  on  share  of  foreign  capital  in  Russian 

enterprises,  460  f. 
One-chamber   system    and   general   vote: 

demanded  by  liberals  of  the  "AUiance" 

(1880),  331- 
"Open  Letter"  of  liberals:    in  answer  to 

Tsar  Nicholas  II. 's  speech  of  January  17 

(29),  1895,  327- 


ANALYTICAL  INDEX 


579 


Opportunism:  of  Free  Russia  (1884)  con- 
demned by  the  Socialist,  428  f. 

Opposition:  to  government  appearing  in 
Russia.  180;  governmental  measures  to 
check  political,  183.  See  also  Conflict, 
Clash,  etc. 

Oppositionaries:  see  Liberals,  Liberalism, 
etc. 

Oppression:  insufficiency  of  whole  system 
of  governmental,  219. 

Organization :  three  stages  of  political,  133 ; 
of  Zerastvos  and  its  defects:  a  building 
without  foundation  and  roof,  2888.; 
of  1865,  or  "Circle  of  Eshootin,"  and 
its  project  of  gradual  propaganda,  393. 

Organized:  labor  since  1896,  479  ff., 
496  ff.;  liberalism,  519  f. 

Oriental  origin  of  Musconte  military  sys- 
tem, 151. 

Origin:  of  national  imiformity,  31;  of 
T.sar's  guard,  158;  of  towns,  226;  of 
socialistic  movement  in  Russia,  361; 
of  nihilism,  364,  384. 

Originarii,  138. 

Origins:  of  Mir.  349;  of  Russian  socialism , 
361;  of  revolutionary  movement  in 
Russia,  383. 

Orlov-Daveedov,  Cotmt:  on  representa- 
tion of  nobles,  advocating  a  bicameral 
scheme,  276,  282. 

Orthodox  church:  and  its  doctrines.  66; 
and  its  relation  to  Old-believers  and  to 
sectarians,  116;  without  spirit  of 
proselytism,  127;  number  of  priests  and 
churches  disproportionate  to  orthodox 
population,  90. 

Orthodox  Marxism:  of  older  generation, 
gains  victory  over  "economisra"  of  new 
generation  of  the  nineties,  484  tT.;  and 
against  "^e^■isionism"  of  Marx  theory, 
487;  and  its  staunch  adherents,  the 
Russian  social  democracy,  488. 

Orthodox  Marxists  =  the  old  "Group  of 
the  Liberation  (Emancipation)  of  La- 
bor": and  their  program,  482  f.;  or 
Socialistic  Democrats  vs.  Socialistic 
Revolutionaries,  or  "People's  Will 
party,"  489. 

Orthodoxy:  a  "Russian"  religion.  125; 
and  individual  belief.  126;  a  most  dis- 
tinctive feature  of  national  type  accord- 
ing to  imtionalistic  idea,  131  (but  see 
547  f.);  one  of  the  trinity  of  Russian 
official  nationalism,  182. 

Osvoboshdaneya OT  Emancipation,  518,  527. 

Outbreak  of  January  22,  1905,  535. 

Ouvarov,  Count:  and  hiS  formula  for 
"official  nationalism,"  181. 

Overproduction  in  industries  and  its  con- 
sequences, 462. 

Overprotedion :  cause  of  industrial  crisis, 
459- 

Overtaxation:    and  its  effects,  442,  472  f. 


Paganism:  cropping  out  in  peasants, 
religion  and  practices.  67  ff.;  transition 
of.  to  ritualism,  67,  131. 

Pahlen,  governor  of  Wilna:  on  Jewish 
Bund  (1903).  501  f. 

Pansla\"ism  of  Ilerzen,  371,  382  f. 

Paris  conprcss  (December,  1904)  of  radi- 
cals and  liberals,  524  f. 

Parish  priests:  and  their  lack  of  educa- 
tion, 8-';  ill-treated  by  squires,  88  f.; 
and  bishops,  89;  and  "Old -believers," 
116;  and  sectarians,  117;  schools  vs. 
Zemstvo  schools,  213. 

Parliament,  or  National  Council:  in 
fifteenth  century.  149. 

"Particular  consultation":  a  secret  tri- 
bunal, 192. 

"Partition  of  land":  starting-point  of 
propaganda  among  peasiuits,  510. 

Party  organization:  not  yet  existing  in 
Russia,  222. 

Pashko\ists  (about  1876),  92,  122. 

Pa.ssport  system,  194. 

Paternal  tutelage  until  1855,  period  of,  204. 

Patriarch  of  Russia:  residing  in  Moscow, 
7q;  and  Tsar's  duarchy  in  seventeenth 
century,  85. 

Paul:  land  grants  under  Catherine  II. 
and  under,  235. 

Paulikianism :   influence  of,  103. 

Pauperism:  cure  of,  in  ancient  Russian 
religious  practice,  71. 

Paying  and  purchasing  power:  of  Russian 
peasants  e.xhausted,  446  f.;  of  popula- 
tion in  general,  462,  465,  474;  schemes 
for  relief  of,  457  f. 

"Peaceful  work"  of  improvement  by 
Zcmstvos,  and  its  results,  296  f. 

Peasant  districts,  145;  or  village  schools, 
211  f.;  after  emancipation,  342;  repre- 
sentation of,  in  Zemstvos,  since  1800, 
insignilicant,  344;  and  usurers  or  \illage 
creditors.  346;  and  taxes,  rent,  and 
interests  on  loans,  346  f. 

Peasantry:  political  consciousness  among 
Russian,'353;  sacrificed  to  landlords  by 
autocracy  of  sixteenth  century,  355  fl.; 
chronic  insolvency  present  state  of,  443. 

Peasants:  present  paganism  of,  67;  con- 
dition of,  during  eighteenth  and  nine- 
teenth centuries,  171  ff.;  liberation  of, 
causes  final  decline  of  nobility  and 
gentry,  237  f.;  schemes  tor  emancipa- 
tion of,  265  ff.  (see  Emancipation); 
revolutionary  spirit  among.  307;  econo- 
mic position  of,  345;  political  ideas  of: 
for  autocracy,  ag:iin.st  nobility,  353; 
anticipate  emancipation,  under  Cath- 
erine II.,  357;  become  glebae  ascripti. 
3S7f.;  dissatisfied  with  conditions  of 
emancipation,  359;  suspicious  of  social- 
ist agitators  in  beginning,  360;  repre- 
sent "proletariat"  of  western  socialism, 


58o 


RUSSIA  AND  ITS  CRISIS 


384  f.;  protests  and  rebellions  of, 
against  landlords  and  men  of  ser- 
vice, at  end  of  sixteenth  century,  357; 
prosperity  of.  changed  since  1861,  43";  i-'. 
ruin  of,  increased  by  disproportionate 
increase  of  taxes,  442;  paying  and  pur- 
chasing power  of.  exhausted,  4461-; 
schemes  for  reUef  of,  457  f-;  income  of, 
different  in  northern  and  southern 
Russia,  448;  bank  assisting,  450; 
struggle  of,  for  competition,  451".  mner 
migrations  of,  in  search  of  employment, 
437,  452;  "proletarization"  of,  in  social- 
ists' program,  492  f- 
Peasants'  alUance:    formed  by  "Agrarian 

League,"  510. 
Peculiarity  of  Russian  sectarianism,  102. 
People   or  educated  classes:    debate  be- 
tween Herzen  and  Tourgucnev,  2801!., 
320.  . 

People's  lectures:   no  free  speech  m,  199; 
hbraries:  books,  periodicals,  and  news- 
papers   permitted    and    forbidden    in, 
202  f.,  478. 
"People's  Will"  party  (1879):   terroristic, 
but   not   anarchistic,   left   wmg   of   the 
"Land  and  Liberty"  party,  419  f-.  421; 
program  of,  418  f.;    surviving  members 
of,  active  again  in  the  nineties,  489- 
Pepes  and  Riegos,  257. 
Periodicals     and     newspapers     permitted 
and  forbidden  in  people's  hbraries,  202  f. 
Permanent    settlements    in    \-illages:     as 
means  of  propaganda,  410  f.;    prove  a 
failure,  413. 
Persecution  of  pubUc  opinion  in  Russia, 

250  ff. 
Persigny's  press  law  accepted  by  Russia, 

204,  263  f. 
Peter  the   Great:    nationalism  after,  40; 
Europeanizing    Russia,    40;     religious 
reforms   of,   83,   86;     creates   office   of 
superior  procurator,  86;    Antichrist  of 
priestless   Old-beUevers,   95".     break   in 
political    tradition     under,     168,  _  552; 
bureaucratic  absolutism  of,  170;    intro- 
duces passport  system  for  poll-tax  pur- 
poses, 194;    and    secondary    education, 
215;   introduces  factories,  227;    democ- 
ratizes service,  232.  557;   capitation  tax 
of,  later  on  abolished,  444".    introduces 
copper  currency,  467. 
Peter  III.:  Poogachov  as,  168. 
Petersburg:  see  St.  Petersburg. 
Petition  of  1865:   and  Tsar  Alexander  I.'s 

reply,  283. 
"Petition  of  Rights":    by  St.  Petersburg 
Zemstvos'  meeting,    November     19-21, 
1904,    53c;     universal    indorsement   of, 
535  f.;    autocracy's  answer  to,  533  f- 
Petrashevtsee,  socialistic,  of  1848,  377,  384. 
Philanthropy:    and  the  Decembrists,  256. 
"Philippians":    extreme  Priestless  "Old- 
believers,"  47. 


Philosophical  nationalism  of  Slavophils,  52. 

366;  justification  of,  of  autocracy,  170  f. 

Philotheus:      on     universal     mission     of 

Russian  national  church,  75. 
Pissarev,  365. 

Place   of   feeling   and   religion   in   Slavo- 
philism, 54. 
Plasticity:      chief     feature     of     Russian 

national  type,  13,  S47 
Plehanov,     322;      starts    Russian    social 
democracy  (1883),  425-  487;    evolution 
of,    from    pure    populism    to   orthodox 
Marxism,  429;    moderation  of,  typical 
for  the  eighties,  426  f. 
Plehve:    as  Witte's  successor,  and   local 
assembhes  of   1902,  476  f-l    on  revolu- 
tionary movement  among  teachers  and 
pupils  of  colleges  and  secondary  schools, 
511- 
Pobedonostsev,    178    n.    11;     advocating 
Leontiev's  program  of  policy,  61;    and 
excommunication  of  Count  Leo  Tolstoy, 
86  f.;   report  of,  for  1895  and  following 
years  on  forced  converts  to  Orthodoxy, 
127;   and  parish  schools,  213;   opposed 
to  reforms  (1881),  314;  author  of  mani- 
festo of   April   27,   1881,  315;    defeats 
(189s)  aims  of  Zemstvos,  327;    part  of, 
in  manifesto  of  December  26.  1904.  532, 
534  f.;      on     self  defense     and     official 
nationaUsm,  539",    Part  of,  in  manifesto 
of  March  4,  1905,  543  ff- 
PoUce:    courts,  three   special,    189;    sur- 
veillance   of    secondary    schools,    215; 
department  on  distribution  of  revolution- 
ary leatlets  (1902),  509;   persecution  on 
the  increase,  514. 
Polish:    influence  in  earlier  Russia,   144. 
140;    uprising  (1863)  and  "Land  and 
Liberty"  organization,  390;    socialistic 
parties,  499  f- 
Political:     tradition,    131-220;     organiza- 
tion and  its  three  stages,  133;    organi- 
zation in  western  and  in  eastern  Europe, 
134;     development    and    its    outward 
springs,  135;   tradition,  549;   broken  by 
Peter   the   Great,    168,    552;    freedom, 
martjTs  of.  172;   reform,  postponement 
of,     embitters     pubUc     opinion,     176; 
opposition  and  governmental  measures 
against  it,  183;   role   of  university  stu- 
dents and  measures  against  them,  218; 
parties  in  Russia,  221;    opinion's  mod- 
erate (or  Uberal)  and  radical  (or  social- 
istic) currents,  222;   influence  of  gentry, 
235;   power  of  gentry  as  a  social  group 
lacking,  246.  557;    hberal  opinion  and 
the   two   stages  of   its   history.   248  ff.; 
liberalism  combatted  by  nationalism  as 
well  as  socialism,  260;   power  of  gentry 
as   educated   class   representing    public 
opinion,    248;     first    demonstrations   of 
local  assemblies  of  nobility  (1858-64), 
268;  representation  and  Moscow  assem- 
bly of  186.S,  274;    parties  differentiate 
positively  in  1S63,  283  f.;    schemes  of 


ANALYTICAL  LXDEX 


S8i 


liberals  (1880).  300;  actj\-ity  and  peti- 
tions of  liberals.  304  ff. ;  ideas  of  peas- 
ants. 353;  reform  and  terrorism  come  to 
front  in  the  late  seventies.  414  f.;  dis- 
aiiection  one  of  the  impelling  forces 
toward  reform,  433  f.",  disaffection 
supported  by  actiWty  of  revolutionary 
parlies  (since  1900),  479  f.;  disturbances 
in  factory  life,  505;  agitation  among 
soldiers  as  reported  by  Kooropatkin, 
S12  f.;  crimes  increased  at  present,  516; 
present  role  of  liberalism.  518;  freedom 
in  Japan  and  in  Russia.  554  f.;  idealism 
of  educated  class,  558?.;  freedom  in 
gentry's  program,  558  f.;  reform,  ur- 
gency of,  561. 

Poogachov:  takes  name  of  Catherine's 
assassinated  husband,  Peter  111.,  168; 
chief  of  peasants'  social  movement, 
S.sS,  301;  leader  of  popular  uprisings, 
412;  "the  Poogachov  points,"  511. 
'  Poor  tillage:  one  of  the  causes  of  impov- 
erishment of  peasants  of  southern  Russia, 
440,  450. 

Pooshkin:  on  Decembrists,  255. 

Popular:  theology  of  eighteenth  century 
and  before,  crude  and  materialistic  in 
belief  and  practices.  70;  religion:  Old- 
beUevers  and  sectarians,  91. 

Population  in  European  Russia  since 
Peter  the  Great,  22. 

Populism  and  terrorism  contradictory. 
417.     See  also  Pure  populism. 

Populists:  or  "Land  and  Liberty"  party. 
and  its  program.  411;  teacliing  vs.  the 
new  generation  of  the  nineties.  485; 
compromise  (1874)  with  "ideals  of  the 
people,"  409. 

Positive  traits  of  Russian  character,  15. 

Pososhkov  :  on  popular  belief  in  ei'jht- 
eenth  century,  68;  on  practical  charily, 
72. 

Postponement  of  political  reform  em- 
bitters public  opiniun,  176. 

Pouvoirs  inlermedimres:  a  creation  of 
Catherine  II. ,  helps  nobiUty,  but  not 
botu'geoisic  nor  serfs,  171,  552. 

"Power  of  the  state":  according  to  Slavo- 
phils, 56. 

Prairie  settlers:  protected  by  Muscovite 
government,  6. 

Prayer:  in  early  Russian  church,  70. 

Predominance  of  nobility:  remains  in 
Zemstvos,  241. 

"Preliminary  confinement"  of  political 
criminals,  517. 

Preparations  for  a  social  revolution  in 
1863,  389. 

Pre-Reformation  ideas  in  Russia  and  their 
influence,  103  f. 

Pre-revolutionary  ideas  of  religious  and 
political  freedom.  26. 

Present  Rtvnlutionary  Movement  in  Poland: 
quotation  from,  499  f. 


Present :  struggle  for  civilization  in  Russia 
and  its  significance.  4;  general  demand 
for  aboUtion  of  autonomy,  refiected  by 
speech  of  Wolkenstein,  176  f.;  struggle 
between  liberalism  and  government, 
328  ff. 

Preservation  of  the  old:  only  policy  of 
Pobedonostsev  and  his  followers,  61. 

Press:  attempts  to  influence,  208;  clandes- 
tine, 210  f.;  muEzHng  of,  2058,  534; 
law  of  Persigny,  263  f. 

"Previous  censure."  204,  206;    detention, 

49S,  soo. 

Price  of  grain:  uncontrollable  by  Russian 
producer,  456. 

Priest-acknowledging  and  Priestless  Old- 
believers,  91  ft. 

Prim.-iry  south-Russian  type,  142;  in  con- 
trast with  Muscovite  type,  146. 

Primitive  democracy:  quite  well  preserved. 
136. 

Prince  and  aristocracy,  139,  147  f.,  15S. 

Princes:     Muscovite,   form    autocracy   at 

end  of  fifteenth  century,  550. 
Private  Chancery:    Third  Section  of  his 

Majesty's.  186,  192,  204. 

Private  gatherings:  closely  watched,  19S. 

Process  of   colonization  and  development 

in  Russia  and  United  States,  5,  438. 

Program:  political  by  boyars.  of  a  consti- 
tution about  1598.354  f.;  of  Herzen,  372; 
of  Russian  socialism,  385;  of  "Land  and 
Liberty"  party,  411;  of  Shellyabov's 
militant  sociaHsm  ("People's  Will" 
party),  418;  of  north-Russian  .society  of 
"Land  and  Liberty"  party  (1880), 424  f.; 
of  "Orthodox  Marxists,"  483;  of  Social 
Revolutionaries  (1898).  491;  of  Social 
Democracy  (1900),  493;  of  liberalism 
in  present  conditions.  518  IT.,  563;  of 
radicals  (revolutionaries)  and  that  of 
hbcrals  (constitutionalists)  gradually 
appro.ximating.  523  f.;  of  gentry  is  two- 
fold: emancipation  of  peasants  and  po- 
litical freedom,  558  f. 

Programs:  agrarian,  organized  by  "Agrar- 
ian League"  (1900),  492,  499. 

Progressive  public  opinion:  and  defenders 
of  the  old,  tradition,  28. 

Prohibitive:  measures  against  press, 
205  f  ;  tariff  of  1891  and  its  conse- 
quences, 459  f.,  470  ff. 

Prokopo\ich,  Theophanes:  on  theory  of 
"social  contract,"  169. 

"Proletariat"  of  western  socialism  repre- 
sented by  ix'asants  in  Russia,  384  f. 

"  Proletarization"  of  peasants  in  socialists' 
program,  402  f. 

"Promised  land"  of  Russian  future,  146. 

Proneya  holdings:  especially  in  Servia  in 
fourteenth  century,  152. 


582 


RUSSIA  AND  ITS  CRISIS 


Propaganda:     liberal,    among    Zerastvos 
and  Mr.  Witte,  305  {•;    gradual,  aim  of 
organization      of       1865       (circle      of 
"Eshootin"),  i93\   in  cities  always  suc- 
cessful, 414;    of  "Agrarian  League"  of 
Socialist  Revolutionaries  (1002)^08  f.; 
among  peasants  and  its  starting-point, 
510;    by  the  Bund  among  soldiers,  512. 
Prophetism  in  Russia:  appearance  of,  106. 
Proselytism:  spirit  of,  absent  from  Ortho- 
dox church,  127. 
Protection:   Department  of,  i8q;   state  of, 
and  its  by-laws,  191,  ig?;  of  aristocracy 
under  Demetrius  Tolstoy,  239;  of  indus- 
tries a  most   important  cause  of  agri- 
cultural crisis,  446  ff.,  459. 
Protectionism:    optimistic  ^^ews  of  Witte 

(1899)  on,  465. 
Protective    legislation    since    founding   of 

factories  by  Peter  the  Great,  459. 
Protestant     ideas:      influencing     Russian 

belief,  103. 
Proudhon:     anarchism    of,    336,    369  f.; 
forerunner   of   Russian   socialism,   361, 
363.  367- 
Provinces:    conditions  of  life  in,  changed 

by  work  of  Zemstvos,  296. 
Provincial  assembhes,  or  Zemstvos  (which 
see),  241;  idea  of,  in  scheme  of  Decem- 
brists of  1825,  310;  recommended  by 
Dolgorookee  (i860)  and  Stepnyak 
(189s),  310- 
Pskov:  iee  Novgorod. 
Public:  meetings  forbidden,  197;  lectures 
strictly  controlled,  198;  libraries  of  the 
educated  and  books  forbidden  in,  201  f., 
478;  schools,  211  f.;  debt  and  foreign 
loans,  473;  prosecutor's  position  shun- 
ned by  men  of  honor,  516. 
Pubhc  opinion:  and  Catherine  II.  during 
French  Revolution,  26;  romantic  and 
abstract  nature  of,  during  reign  of 
Nicholas  I.,  52,  259;  and  constitution, 
173,  176  f.,  182  ff.;  conflict  between 
government  and,  183;  more  and  more 
embittered,  210  f.;  two  currents  of 
present,  222,  ';6o;  represented  by  gentry 
as  the  educated  class,  248;  beginnings 
of,  248  ff.;  persecuted  by  government, 
250  ff.,  254;  becoming  discordant,  it 
loses  hold  on  the  government,  282;  in 
Russia  and  Herzen,  371  f.;  only  source 
of  power  of  UberaHsm,  518;  purposely 
falsified  by  government  since  1900, 
540  f.;  democratization  of,  559;  unifi- 
cation of,  560. 
"  Public  tranquillity" :  and  the  press,  206  f., 

306;  and  strikes,  486. 
Pure  populism:  of  General  (or  Black) 
Land  Partition  evolves  into  pure  social- 
ism, 422  f.;  ultimate  end  of  (orthodox) 
Marxism,  424. 
Pure  socialism:  favored  by  workingmen 
in  cities,  414;  whose  point  of  view  is 
formulated  by  Axelrod  in  1880,  423- 


Pure  socialists,  or  "Lavrists":  object  to 
further  propaganda  among  the  peasants, 
408  f.,  422  f. 

Race  and  nation:    difTerent  one  from  the 

other,  31. 
Radeeshchev:  A  Journey  from  Petersburg 

lo  Moscow  (1790),  26,  253,  257. 
Radical  and  moderate  currents  of  political 

opinion,  222. 
Radicalism:    clash  between  political  and 
social,  281  f.;    and  nationalism  irrecon- 
cilable since  era  of  "Great   Reforms," 
366. 
Radicals:    in  Russia  and  idea  of  "feder- 
ahsm,"   310  f.;    and   liberals  gradually 
approximating  each  other  in  their  pro- 
grams, 523  f.;    Paris  Congress  (Decem- 
ber, 1904)  of  hberals  and,  524  f.    See  also 
Revolutionaries,  etc. 
Rahzin,  Stenka:    of  seventeenth  century, 

leader  of  popular  uprisings,  412. 
Rank,  or  Chin:    aristocracy  of,  in  eight- 
eenth century,  234. 
Rapidity  of  Russian  development,  27. 
Rationalism:    not    favorable   to   national- 
istic idea,  46  ff.,  547;  shortcomings  of, 
according  to  Slavophils,  53. 
Raznochintsee:   see  Men  of  nuxed  ranks. 
Reaction:  of  Neekon  against  national  type 
of  church,   79;    against   Bakoonin  and 
Nechayev  in  favor  of  Marxism,  398  fit., 
405- 
Reactionaries:     in    Russian    society    of 

eighteenth  century,  41. 
Reactionary:  type  of  nationalistic  idea,  35; 
nationalism  of  Leontiev  and  Pobedon- 
ostsev,  62;  policy  of  Alexander  I..  257  f.; 
movement   under  .\lexander    III..  269; 
policy    of    government    creates   general 
dissatisfaction,  303. 
Rebellion  of  peasants  against  their  lords 
(1648)  ended  by  the  Muscovite  govern- 
ment, 357- 
Reconciliation:   between  spirit  of  tradition 
and  spirit  of  religious  freedom  attempted 
by  Slavophils,  56,  129;  of  two  socialistic 
factions  (the  revolutionaries  and  the  new 
democratic)  attempted  (1889  ff.),  4298. 
Reconstruction   of   nationalism   by   Dani" 

levsky,  58. 
Reflection  of  party  variances  upon  debates 

on  constitution  in  1865.  274. 
Reform:  postponement  of  political,  em- 
bitters pubUc  opinion,  176;  and  its 
impelling  forces:  material  want  and 
poUtical  disaffection,  324,  433  f.;  ur- 
gency of,  561.  See  also  "Era  of  Great 
Reforms." 
Reformation:  in  general,  causes  for,  10 1; 
in  Russia,  102;  Pskov  and  Novgorod 
seats  of  fifteenth-century,  103;  action  of 
sixteenth-century,  104. 


ANALYTICAL  LXDEX 


583 


Reforms:  religious,  by  Neekon.  7q;  of 
Peter  the  Great.  83.  86;  political,  of 
Alexander  I.,  173,  254. 

Refugees:  demand  a  constitution  (1S62  Q.), 
278. 

Region  of  southern  colonization,  11  ff.,  146. 

"Regulations  concerning  enforced  and 
extraordinary  protection:"  enforce  sys- 
tem of  self-defense,  187  f. 

"Rehabilitation  of  the  Flesh":  in  theory 
of  nihilism,  364. 

Reign  of  Antichrist:  in  doctrine  of  Old- 
believers,  93. 

Religion:  and  its  progress  among  lower 
classes  in  1780,  26;  in  east  and  west 
according  to  Slavophilism.  54;  and 
charity  in  early  Russian  church,  70; 
popular:  Old-believers  and  sectarians, 
91. 

Religious:  freedom  and  tradition,  attempt 
of  Slavophils  to  reconcile  spirit  of,  56, 
129;  tradition.  65-130,  548  f.;  and 
break  in  it  through  reforms  of  Peter 
the  Great,  83.  86.  549;  indifference  of 
educated  class  owing  to  break  of  tra- 
dition. 83;  reforms  of  Xeekon,  79;  evolu- 
tion, law  of.  10 1 ;  tolerance  decried  by 
representative  and  apxilogists  of  estab- 
lished church,  123;  and  demanded  by 
educated  classes.  128  f.;  freedom  and 
Tsar,  123  f.;  and  vs.  tradition.  129; 
immutability  not  a  national  distinction 
of  Russia,  132,  547  f. 

Reorganization  and  unification  of  social 
democracy  (1903),  489. 

"Repentant  nobleman"  of  Mihaylovsky, 
376. 

Representation:  failure  of  Catherine  II. 
to  start  a,  172;  as  demanded  by  different 
political  groups,  268;  political,  and 
Moscow  (1863)  assembly.  274;  Orlov- 
Daveedov  on,  by  nobles,  276,  282; 
four-storied,  a  .scheme  of  twenty  years 
ago.  again  favored  by  many  liberals.  520. 

Representative  assembly  tmder  Catherine 
II.,  172,  237, 

Repressive  measures  of  government  since 
December  26,  1904,  534. 

Revenue  and  expense:  disproportionate, 
causes  agrarian  crLsis,  430,  439. 

Revisionism  of  Marx's  theory  defeated  by 
"orthodox"  Marxism,  487.  See  also 
Legal  Marxism. 

Revival  of  liberal  movement  in  Zemstvos 
after  death  of  Alexander  III.  (1894),  325. 

Revolution:  agrarian,  even  expected  by 
Russian  government  in  the  sixties,  386; 
and  agrarian  programs  organized  by 
"Agrarian  League,"  and  by  Social- 
Democrats,  492,  499, 

Revolutionaries:  during  decade  1880-90, 
320;  liberals  intermediators  between 
government  and  ,518.  See  also  Radicals, 
etc. 


Rrcolulionary  Russia:  organ  since  1900  of 
Social  Revolutionaries,  498, 

Revolutionary:  Socialist  party.  285;  move- 
ment in  Russia  in  its  origins  and 
Bakoonin.  3S3;  program  and  emancipa- 
tion of  peasants.  385  f.;  movement  of 
the  sixties  and  its  results.  397;  and  of 
the  la.st  decade,  479  ff,;  spirit  in  Finland 
and  the  Caucasus,  503;  and  in  villages 
among  the  pea.sants,  507;  and  in  army, 
509  ff,,  512. 

Revolutionists:  government  asks  help 
against  (1878),  303. 

Riegos  and  Pepes,  257. 

"Right  of  opinion":  embodied  by  the  Old 

Russian    States    General    according    to 

Slavophils,  56, 
"Right   of   monarch's  will":     by   Proko- 

povich.  169. 
Ritualism:  transition  from  to  evangelical 

and  spiritual  Christianity,  83  ff.,  131, 
Romanovs,  230, 

Romantic  idea  of  nationality  in  nineteenth 
century  vs.  rationalism,  48,  547. 

Rousseau's  democratic  theory  of  social 
contract  rejected   by  Catherine  II.,  170. 

"Rurmers"  or  "Wanderers":  the  anar- 
chistic Pricstless  Old-believers  (1770), 
92,  100, 

Rural:  commanders  of  Mir,  344;  democ- 
racy in  early  Russia.  8, 

Russia  and  Europe:   by  Danilevsky,  58. 

Russia:  and  its  crisis,  3-564;  historical 
tradition  of,  3-29;  significance  of  present 
struggle  for  civilization  in,  4;  till  six- 
teenth century.  6;  density  of  population 
in  European,  since  Peter  the  Great,  22; 
material  growth,  22;  lack  of  unity  of 
poUtical  and  social  tradition  in.  23;  at 
end  of  nineteenth  century.  27;  nation- 
alistic idea  in.  30-64:  and  other  Euro- 
pean countries  at  their  first  meeting.  33; 
under  influence  of  foreigners  in  middle 
of  seventeenth  century,  36  ff.;  and 
Peter  the  Great's  efforts  at  European- 
izing  it,  40;  religious  tradition  of,  65- 
131;  and  influence  of  German  Reforma- 
tion, 104;  political  tradition  of,  132-221; 
no  exception  to  general  rule  of  religious 
evolution,  131;  nor  of  political  tradition, 
132,  .'147  f-;  liberal  idea  in,  221-333; 
socialistic  idea  in,  334-432;  role  of,  in 
bringing  about  a  soci,aiistic  stage  of 
human  history,  368;  crisis  and  urgency 
of  reform  in,  433-539;  still  an  agri- 
cultural country.  435;  agricultural  local 
conditions  in  southwestern,  southeast- 
ern, and  northwestern,  437;  monetary 
history  of,  466  ff.;  financial  crLsis  of,  and 
proposed  schemes  of  reUef,  466  ff., 
473  ff.;  in  process  of  change,  546;  social 
forces  of,  weak,  556,  See  also  Early 
Russia, 

Russia  and  Japan:   see  Japan. 


584 


RUSSIA  AND  ITS  CRISIS 


Russia  and  the  United  States:  see  Amer- 
ica, .American,  and  United  States. 

Russia  on  the  Eve  of  the  Tzventiclh  Century: 
by  Cheecherrin,  329  f. 

Russian  and  Greek  churches:  their  his- 
torical antagonisni,  73,  differences  in 
creed  and  ritual  early  emphasized. 

Russian  character:  its  positive  and  nega- 
tive traits,  13  £f.;  hypocrisy.  15;  \irtues 
and  vices,  backbone  mis.sing  in,  18; 
social  mind  undeveloped  and  its  defi- 
ciencies illustrated,  18  f.;  culture  and 
eighteenth  century,  40;  social  life  of 
eighteenth  century,  41;  romantic  move- 
ment started  in  Moscow  after  1825.  52; 
culture  and  its  genuine  type:  Great 
Russians,  especially  Moscow  circle,  60; 
culture,  local  types  of  early,  141;  lower 
classes  and  their  aspirations,  342; 
"free  love"  and  its  true  character,  365. 

Russian  Characteristics:  by  Lanin,  13. 

Russian  historical  tradition,  3-29,  63.  547; 
settlement,  5;  and  its  agricultural  effects 
at  present,  438;  fate  of  aborigines,  6; 
drift  of  immigration,  7;  colonists  lack- 
ing in  energy  and  initiative,  1 1 ;  language 
constantly  changing  and  wavering,  ig; 
development  most  rapid,  21;  conditions 
affected  by  French  Revolution,  26; 
(Moscow  circle)  as  opposed  to  Great 
Russian,  60;  of  future  typified  by  "All- 
brethren"  and  like  sects,  120;  south 
the  "promised  land"  of  Russian  future, 
146;  population  agriculturist  80  per 
cent.,  342;  crisis  and  urgency  of  reform, 
4:53-545;  enterprises  and  foreign  capital, 
460  f'.;  history  changing  rapidly  and 
essentially,  546- 

Russian  landlord  of  eighteenth  century,  44; 
village  coinmune,  55,  367;  peasantry  of 
seventeenth  centurv  still  more  pagan 
in  belief  than  Christian,  68;  peasants: 
economic  condition  of,  345  ff.;  political 
consciousness  among,  353;  represent 
in  Russia  proletariat  of  western  social- 
ism, 384  f.;  source  of  income,  448  ff. 
See  also  Mir.  Peasant,  Peasantry,  Vil- 
lage community,  etc. 

Russian  national  type,  13,  20  f.,  547; 
nationalistic  idea,  30-64;  nationalistic 
theory  based  on  western  philosophic 
thought,  51;  nationalism  becomes  mes- 
sianic and  cosmopolitan,  35.  57;  state 
and  religion  idealized  in  theory  of 
Slavophils.  56  f.;  Byzantinism  of  l,eon- 
tiev,  61;  \\e\v  of  national  character.  76; 
tvpe,  142  ff.;  monarchy  anti-aristocratic, 
military,  not  really  democratic,  158; 
official  nationalism's  trinity,  182. 

Russian  political  tradition,  132-221:  op- 
position's first  appearance,  180;  and 
government's  measures  to  check  it,  1S3; 
liberal  idea,  221-333;  political  parties, 
221;  libenalism  as  compared  with 
English  and  German,  224,  249,  253; 
Uberalism  different  in  nature,  owing  to 
peculiarities    of    social    structure,    225; 


bourgeoisie,  225  f.,  558;  liberalism  not 
bourgeois,  but  intellectual,  226;  perse- 
cution of  public  opinion,  250  ff.;  Ma- 
sonry persecuted  by  Catherine  II.,  253; 
"intellectuals"  in  time  of  Nicholas  I., 
262;  radicals  and  idea  of  federalism, 
310  f.;  socialistic  idea,  334-432;  social- 
ism, 335  ff.;  drifting  from  the  point  of 
view  of  Bakoonin  to  that  of  Marx,  341; 
socialism,  origins  of,  361;  its  leaders, 
363;  public  opinion  and  Herzen,  371  f.; 
revolutionary  movement  and  its  origins, 
383;  socialism's  program,  385;  branch 
of  "International"  founded  by  Necha- 
yev,  396  f.;  masses  appear  for  first  time 
on  political  stage,  482;  social  democ- 
racy a  staunch  friend  of  "orthodox" 
Mar.xism,  488. 

Russian  religious  tradition,  65-130:  Or- 
thodox church  and  its  doctrines,  far 
behind  eastern,  66;  church:  _  old-fash- 
ioned in  ritual  and  stationary  in  dogma, 
67;  belief  mixed  with  paganism,  67; 
orthodoxy  the  simplified  and  material- 
ized eastern  creed,  67;  saints,  68,  77; 
popular  theology,  69;  prayer,  and 
charity  in  early  church,  70  f.;  clergy  in 
early  times,  70  f.;  church  and  hier- 
archy's development  since  fall  of  Con- 
stantinople, 71,  75;  national  church 
and  its  universal  mission,  75;  national 
type  of  creed,  76;  of  reUgion,  78;  both 
condemned  by  Neekon,  the  patriarch.  85; 
patriarch's  seat  in  Moscow,  76;  church 
autocephalic  since  end  of  sixteenth  cen- 
tury, 79;  theology  of  seventeenth  and 
eighteenth  centuries  eclectic  and  scho- 
lastic, 83;  church,  secularization  of ,84; 
sects,  92;  sectarianism  and  its  pecuUar- 
ity,  102;  evangeUcism  as  compared  with 
western  Europe's,  102  f.,  108;  reforrna- 
tion,  causes  for.  102;  pre-reforraalion 
ideas  and  their  influence,  103;  prophet- 
isiTi,  appearance  of.  106;  religion  equiv- 
alent with  Orthodoxy,  125;  Orthodoxy 
a  most  distinctive  feature  of  national 
type  according  to  nationalistic  idea,  131; 
but  also  a  product  of  national  evolution, 
548. 

Russianization:  sovjrce  of  intolerance,  126. 

Sacrament  of  marriage  and  the  Priestless 
Old-beUevers,  98. 

Sacrosanct  character  of  Tsarism,  168 

St.  Nicholas:  the  beloved  saint,  68. 

St.  Petersburg:  in  1789,  25;  in  1861,  27; 
guard  regiments  of,  in  eighteenth  cen- 
tury and  their  influence,  235;  bureau- 
cracy of,  omnipotent  in  the  early  sixties, 
271;  strike  of  1806  in,  and  its  lesson, 
480;  meeting  of  all  the  Zemstvos  at 
(1904),  529  f.;  press  more  Hberal  since 
November  19-21,  1904,  531  f.;  massacre 
of.  535;  Workingmen's  Society  in,  536  f. 

St.  Simon:  sec  Feuerbach. 

Saints  of  Russian  church,  77- 


ANALYTICAL  INDEX 


S8S 


Samarin:  one  of  real  authors  of  Emanci- 
pation Act,  267. 

Saratov:  demonstration  of  1903,  176  f. 

Saybrces:  or  "joint  owners,"  138. 

Sazonov:  "executioner"  of  Plehve,  538. 

Schemes  of  liberal  groupys  of  twenty  j-ears 
ago:  abandoned,  except  two,  520. 

Schismatics:  or  "Old-believers"  and  "Old- 
ritualists"  of  seventeenth  century  and 
later,  80,  84.  91  ff.;  anathematized  in 
1667,  81 ,  93;  inllueuce  of,  with  peasants, 
90  f.;  teachings  of,  93;  two  factions  of, 
91. 

Scholasticism  of  Russian  theology,  82. 

School  regime  of  Demetrius  Tolstoy: 
hated  by  all,  216,  31S. 

Schools:  lacking  entirely  in  Moscow  of 
1680,  24;  peasant  or  village,  211  f.; 
insufficient  in  number,  214. 

Schwanebach:  on  present  condition  of 
peasantry,  44-1;  and  his  scheme  of 
ameUoration,  458. 

Search  for:  legal  sanction  of  autocracy,  162; 
new  legal  formula:  autocracy  founded 
on  "natural  law,"  168. 

Second  advent:  in  doctrine  of  Old- 
beUevers,  93  ff.,  106. 

Secondary  schools:  founded  by  Catherine 
II.,  26;   and  high  schools,  214. 

Secondary:  southern  Russian  type,  under 
Polish  feudalism,  X44;  northern  type, 
145- 

Secret:  societies  and  Masonic  lodges  for- 
bidden (1819  ff.),  358;  police  observa- 
tion very  expensive,  and  "secret  fund" 
of  ministry  of  interior  constantly  in- 
creased since  i8g6,  515. 

Sectarian:  general  type  of  a,  120. 

Sectarianism:  development  of.  83,  gi  f. , 
100  ff.;  Boris  Godoonov,  founder  of, 
100;  relation  of  Orthodox  church  to  Old- 
believers  and,  no;  Catherine  11. 
indifferent,  Alexander  I.  favorable  to, 
in;  and  persecution.  123. 

Secularization  of  Russian  church.  84. 

Seepyaghin's  ministry  and  large  number 
of  exiles,  ig6. 

Siebohm:  on  Mir,  350, 

Self-annihilation  of  nationalism,  34  f. 

Self-consciousness  and  self-criticism:  be- 
ginning of  national,  33. 

Self-dcfen.se  of  autocracy:  enforced  by 
"regulations  concerning  enforced  and 
extraordinary  protection."  187  f.;  at- 
tempts of,  to  include  aristocracy  in  its 
system,  239;  and  official  nationah.sm, 
S39- 

Self-government:  organ  of  SociaUst  Revolu- 
tionaries (1887),  428. 

Self-improvement  of  autocracy:  during 
nineteenth  century,  173  ff.;  turned  into 
self-defense,  179,  552. 


Self-preservation:  present  object  of  autoc- 
racy, 179. 

Separation  of  ixipular  faith  from  official 
church,  79, 

Serfs:  condition  of,  during  eighteenth 
and  nineteenth  centuries.  171  ff.,  552, 
559.  See  also  Emancipation  and 
Peasants. 

Sergueyevich :  on  southern  and  northern 
Russi;in  type,  147. 

Settlement:  Russi.an,  and  its  present  agri- 
cultural effects,  5,  438. 

*' Seventh-Day  Observers,"  no. 

"Shalopoots":  spiritualistic  sectarians 
(about  1S50),  92,  121  f. 

Sharahpoo:  advocates  "federalism"  and 
chambers  in  provinces,  331. 

Sliellyabov:  on  pure  socialism  and  popul- 
ism, 400;  on  program  of  militant  social- 
ism or  "People's  Will"  party:  consti- 
tutional convention  freely  elected  by  a 
general  vote,  417  f,,  420;  considers 
liberalism  powerless  in  Russia,  417; 
repudiates  anarchism,  420  ff. 

Shooysky,  Basilius:    the  Tsar  boyar,  355^ 

Shore-Dwellers:  moderate  Priestless  Old- 
believers,  92,  97. 

Shortcomings  of  ratisnalism,  according  to 
Slavophilism,  53. 

Significance  of  present  struggle  for  ci\ili- 
zation  in  Russia.  4. 

Silver:  currency  in  old-time  Russia, 
467;  stoppage  of  free  coinage  of,  470. 

Skoptsee:   see  Castratoes. 

Slav:  opposed  to  European,  a  consequence 
of  Dunilevsky's  theory,  so;  clergy's 
part  in  forging  legend  of  transmission 
of   power  from  Byzantium,  102. 

Sla\'ic  and  Russian  culture:  Leontiev  on, 

60  f. 
Slavophil  political  doctrine  in  Ignatyev's 

scheme,  316. 

Slavophilism,  52,  :8o;  philosopliical 
nationalism  of,  52,  366;  essence  of.  S3; 
shortcomings  of  rationalism  according 
to.  53;  eastern  and  western  church  m 
estimation  of.  54;  feeling  and  religion 
in  system  of,  54;  "right  of  opinion" 
and  "power  of  stale"  according  to,  56; 
untenableness  of,  of  first  half  of  nine- 
teenth century,  57,  and  "official  nation- 
alism," i8o,  239,  280;  and  Japan- 
ophilism,  554. 

Slavophils:  attempt  reconciliation  between 
spirit  of  tradition  and  spirit  of  religious 
freedom,  56,  129;  inlluence  Dean 
Stanley,  and  are  themselves  influenced 
by  Oerman  historian  of  religion,  65; 
and  Russian  village  community,  55.  367. 

Snuril:  or  Russian  peasant,  139. 

Social :  cai)illarity ,  means  of  defense  against, 
9;   tradition  and  lack  of  continuity,  19; 


586 


RUSSIA  AND  ITS  CRISIS 


life  since  eighteenth  century  and  its 
duahsm,  44;  differentiation  in  tribal 
society  a  cause  of  political  development, 
134- 
"Social  contract":  Prokopovich  on  theory 
of,  as  applied  to  Tsars,  169;  of 
Rousseau  too  democratic  for,  and 
rejected  by,  Catherine  II.,  170. 
Social  democracy  in  Russia:  started  by 
Plehanov  in  1883.  425;  role  of,  in  move- 
ments of  last  decade,  483;  staunch  for 
"orthodox"  Marxism.  488;  and  its 
centralistic  reorganization  and  unifica- 
tion (1903),  489;  proposes  in  its  pro- 
gram (1900):  nationalization  of  land, 
493;  cosmopolitan  doctrine  of,  in  strug- 
gle with  and  succumbing  to  local  current 
of  Social  Revolutionaries,  493  f.;  and 
massacre  of  January  22,  1905,  537  f. 
Social  Democratic  Labor  party  (iSgSff.)- 
founded  by  a  group  of  "intellectuals," 
496. 
Social  Democratic  party:  loses,  September 
1897.  Jewish  Bund,  489;  fighting  branch 
of,  490  f. 
Social  revolution:  ultimate  aim  of  modem 
movement,  177;  and  prepiirations  for 
it  in  1863.  389;  views  of  Lavrov  and 
Tkachov  concerning,  398  S.; 
Social  Revolutionaries:  name  of  revived 
"People's  Will"  party,  490;  resuscitate 
terrorist  methods,  490;  program  of, 
of  1898,491;  branch  of  the  "Agrarian 
League"  {which  see),  492.  508  f.;  local 
current  of,  gains  upper  hand  over  cos- 
mopoUtan  doctrine  of  social  democracy, 
493  f.;  organ  and  work  of,  from  1895 
to  1900,  498. 
Social:  structure,  in  its  pecuUarity,  cause 
of  difference  in  Russian  liberalism,  225; 
history  of  nobility  and  gentry,  227-45; 
unrest  general  at  present,  434;  reform 
questions  not  touched  in  Paris  agree- 
ment of  Liberal  and  SociaUst  parties, 
December,  1904.  526  ff.;  forces  in 
Russia  weak,  556. 
Socialism,  Russian:  averse  to  pohtical 
liberaUsm,  260;  of  Russia  different  from 
other  only  in  beginning.  335,  339; 
represents  democracy  in  general,  335; 
and  democracy  in  English-speaking 
countries,  336;  and  in  Germany,  337; 
Bakoonin  its  beginning  and  Marx  its 
end,  341;  Proudhon's  anarchism  the 
forerunner  of,  361,  363,  367;  doctrine 
of  modern,  362;  leaders  of,  363;  of 
Herzen.  365  f.;  has  Russian  peasant  in 
place  of  proletariat  of  western  socialism, 
384  f.;  agricultural  co-operation  program 
of,  38s;  militant  branch  of  Shellyabov, 
417  f.,  420;  one  of  the  two  currents  of 
public  opinion,  222,  560;  aim  of  both 
branches  the  same:  a  political  revolu- 
tion, 495.  See  also  Pure  socialism. 
Socialist:  agitation  in  villages  twenty 
years  ago  and  now,  360;  congress  at 
Zurich  (1872-73)  and  its  debates,  402; 


propaganda  and  "  intellectuals,"  480*, 
editorial  and  literary  activity  of  both 
branches  of  sociaUst  party,  496  ff.,  509  f. 

Socialist:  condemns  opportunism  of  Free 
Russia  (1889),  428  f. 

Socialist  Revolutionaries:  executive  com- 
mittee of,  416,  419;   organ  of,  428. 

Socialistic  democratic  work  from  189s  to 
1900,  496. 

SociaUstic  idea,  334-432:  origin  of  social- 
istic movement  in  Russia,  361;  Russian 
village  community  germ  of  sociaUstic 
society,  according  to  Herzen,  367; 
Russia's  role  in  bringing  about  a  social- 
istic stage  of  human  history,  368;  pro- 
gram of  Herzen,  372;  reconciliation 
attempted  of  the  two  factions  (Social 
Revolutionaries  and  Social  Democrats) 
in  1889  ff.,  429  ff.;  movement  of  the 
nineties  similar  to  that  of  the  seventies 
in  general  features,  but  strongly  sup- 
ported by  the  masses,  481  f.;  parties  in 
Poland,  499  f. 

Socialistic  Revolutionaries  (People's  Will 
party):  vs.  SociaUstic  Democrats  (or- 
thodox Marxists).  489;  but  aim  of  both 
is  same:  political  revolution,  495. 

Socialists:  twenty  years  ago  were  called 
boyars,  or  landlords,  by  suspicious  peas- 
ants, 360;  of  1848  called  Peirashevtsee, 
377,  384;  proletarization  of  peasants  one 
plank  in  platform  of,  492  f.;  activity  of, 
and  practical  results,  495  f. 

"Society  for  Public  Welfare":  work  and 
aims  of,  256. 

Society  of  eighteenth  century  in  Russia: 
backward  and  forward  movement  of, 
41.  45- 

"Society  of  St.  Petersburg  Workingmen": 
a  government  creation,  with  Father 
Gopon  as  president,  536  f. 

"Society  of  the  Allied  Zemstvos  and  of 
Self-Government,"  30s. 

Socinian  influence  on  doctrines  of  Russian 
evangehcism,  210. 

Soldiers:   and  Jewish  Bund,  512. 

Solovyov:  teaches  cosmopohtan  elements 
in  a  national  type  to  be  religion  of 
Russian  people,  62;  cosmopohtan 
theory  of,  of  nationalism,  63;  plan  of, 
of  influencing  newspapers,  210;  one  of 
real  authors  of  Emancipation  Act,  267. 

Soovorin,  328,  330. 

South  Russian  type:  primary,  142;  in 
contrast  with  Muscovite  type,  146. 

Southern  Russia:  frontier  settlement  of, 
at  end  of  sixteenth  century,  7,  356; 
secondary  type  of,  144;  under  Tartar 
yoke,  144,  149;  colonization  of,  11  ff., 
146;  "promised  land"  of  Russian 
future,  146;  Society  of  the  Decembrists 
of.  led  by  Colonel  Pestel,  259  f.;  peas- 
ants of,  and  their  source  of  income,  448; 
inner  migrations  of,  452. 


ANALYTICAL  L\DEX 


S87 


Southwestern,  south-central,  and  north- 
western Russia:  and  its  agricultural 
local  conditions.  437. 

Spark:  literarj-  organ  of  "orthodox  Marx- 
ists." 4S6. 

Speransky's  arguments  for  a  constitution, 
173  {•;  i((  <^so  185.309,  553.  5SS.  562. 

Spies:  and  janitors.  ip3;  in  newspaper 
offices.  216;  at  students'  gatherings.  218. 

Spiritualistic  and  evangelical  currents  of 
Christian  thought.  92,  iii. 

Staho\-ich:  protests  against  religious 
intolerance  and  persecution,  128. 

Standesmonarchie  of  Montesquieu,  170, 
552- 

Standing  armies:  since  John  IV.,  231. 

Stanley.  Dean:  influenced  by  Horayakov 
and  other  Slavophils.  65. 

Storoshiltsee,  138  n.  2,  140. 

State:  idea  of  foreign  to  genuine  life  of 
nation,  according  to  Slavophils,  s^;  f., 
129.  180,  371;  and  religion.  Russian, 
ideahzed  in  theory  of  Slavophils,  56  f. 

State  colonization:  and  military  defense 
as  origin  of  towns,  226. 

State  police:  introduction  of  a  special,  by 
Xicholas  I..  185;  present  organization 
of,  193;  and  activity  in  provinces,  514  f. 

State  sernce:  nobility  of.  second  aristoc- 
racy in  seventeenth  and  eighteenth  cen- 
turies lacks  corporate  spirit,  229;  or- 
ganized by  John  IV.  against  ancient 
aristocracy,  229;  Peter  the  Great 
favoring  lower  middle  class  of  men  of 
serrice  against  nobility  both  of  birth 
and  of.  232. 

States  General  of  ancient  Russia:  embodi- 
ment of  "right  of  opinion,"  according  to 
Slavophils,  56. 

Statisticians'  work  for  Zemstvos,  289. 

Statute:  of  1865  begins  era  of  arbitrary 
rule  legalized  liy  statutes,  204;  of  1890 
(Demetrius  Tolstoy),  319. 

Stepnyak:  recommends  pro\'incial  assem- 
blies (1895).  310;  one  of  leaders  in 
movement  of  1873-74,  405  f.;  attempts 
reconciliation  with  hberalism  (1890), 
320  £f..  428. 

Strict  control  of  public  lectures,  198. 

Strike  in  St.  Petersburg  and  other  cities, 
January  15,  1905,  535  if. 

Strikes:  since  1895,  480  ff.,  496  IT.,  506. 

Strogonov,  Count:  on  indifference  of 
nobility  (1801),  246. 

"Struggle  for  places":  system  of,  in  seven- 
teenth century,  230. 

Struggle:  significance  of  present,  for  ciri- 
lization  in  Russia,  4;  tjctween  liberalism 
and  government.  328  ff.;  for  competition 
among  Kusskin  pea.sants.  451. 

Student  uprisings:  since  1861,  389. 


"Stundcnts":  peasants'  present  name  for 
socialists,  360  f . 

StundLsts:  evangelical  sectarians  (about 
i860),  92,  121  f. 

Superior  procurator:  created  by  Peter  the 

Great,  86. 

Surplus:  of  human  and  horse  power  in 
south  Russian  rural  districts,  and  its 
employment.  450  ff.;  of  exports  over 
imports  steadily  decreasing.  471  f. 

Surveillance:  of  political  suspects,  195; 
of  schools  and  political  r61e  of  classical 
system  of  Demetrius  Tolstoy,  215  f.,  318. 

Svyatopolk-Mirskee:  and  his  ministry  of 
"benevolent  autocracy,"  529,  532,  543. 

Symptoms  of  decay  in  agriculture,  435,  451. 

Synoptic  table  of  Russian  sects,  92. 

System  of  oppression  wholly  insufficient, 
219. 

Tartar:  incursions  and  "Indian  wars," 
ii>  357;  yoke  on  southern  Ru.ssia,  144, 
149. 

Taxation:  local  and  central,  298. 

Taxes:  rent,  and  interests  on  loans  ruina- 
tion of  peasants,  346;  disproportionate 
increase  of,  in  recent  years.  442. 

Teachers  and  pupils  of  colleges  and  sec- 
ondary schools:  join  in  revolutionary 
movement,  511. 

''Temporary":  regulations  legalizing  dis- 
cretionary power,  183;  measures  of  the 
eighties  insufficient  515. 

Terrorism:  and  political  reform  come  to 
front  in  the  late  seventies,  414  f.;  con- 
tradictory with  populism,  417;  theory  of, 
held  by  revolutionaries,  491. 

"Terrorist"  party:  city  wing  of  "Land 
and  Liberty"  party,  415;  methods  of, 
quite  at  variance  with  theory  of  popu- 
lism, 416. 

Terroristic  group  of  1865-66.  393  f.; 
methods  of.  resuscitated  by  Social  Revo- 
lutionaries, 490. 

Theocratic  sanction:  of  autocracy  prevails 
over  legal,  164;  insufficiency  of,  167. 

''Theodosians":  extreme  Pricstlcss  Old- 
believers  (about  1706),  92,  97. 

Thcodosius  of  Pcchcrsk:  bishop  of  first 
popular  monastery  in  Kceycv,  68. 

Thcodosius  the  "Squint-Eyed"':  and  anli- 
trinitarianism,  no. 

Theology:  Russian  popular,  60  f.;  of 
official  church  of  seventeenth  and  eight- 
eenth centuries,  82  f. 

Theoretical  expression  of  nihilism  bor- 
rowed from  abroad,  364. 

"Third  Element":  i.  <•.,  executive  officers 
of  Zemstvos,  290. 

Third  Section  of  his  Majesty's  Private 
Chancery,  and  its  activity,  186,  192,  304. 


588 


RUSSIA  AND  ITS  CRISIS 


"Tliree-field"  system  and  poor  tillage 
impoverish  soutliern  Russian  peasant, 
449  f- 

Three  stages:  of  development  of  nation- 
alism, 35;  of  political  organization,  133. 

Three  special  police  courts  established,  189. 

Tikhomcerov,  Leo,  541. 

Tkachov:  advocates  political  revolution, 
398  ff. 

Tolerance  in  religion:  decried  by  repre- 
sentatives and  apologists  of  established 
church,  123;  demanded  by  all  educated 
classes,  128  f. 

Tolstoy,  Demetrius:  school  regime  of, 
215  f.,  318;  protects  aristocracy,  239; 
minister  of  the  reaction,  318;  statute  of, 
1890  of,  319. 

Tolstoy,  Leo:  and  his  excommunication, 
86  f.;  Christian  anarchism  of,  taught 
in  1770  by  Kuphemius.  too;  and  the 
Dookhobory,  113,  119;  Kreutzcr  Sonata 
of.  365- 

Tourguenev:  and  Herzen  debate  on 
"people  or  the  educated  classes,"  or 
"constitutional  assembly  or  a  conven- 
tion," 280  ff.,  320;  Newly  Broken  Land 
of,  361;  Fathers  and  Sons  of,  repre- 
senting the  two  generations,  the  old  of 
the  forties  and  the  new  of  the  sixties 
(or  "nihilists"),  373-  384- 

Town  and  city  settlements:  become  pre- 
dominant over  work  in  villages  and 
country,  413. 

Tradition:  social,  and  lack  of  con- 
tinuity, 19;  poUtical  and  social,  lacking 
unity,  23,  131-220;  defenders  of  old, 
against  progressive  public  opinion,  28, 
41  fi.;  break  of  old,  29;  historical,  63, 
547;  and  nationalism,  64.  547;  religious, 
65-130.  548  f.;  political,  broken  by 
Peter  the  Great.  68,  549.  552;  religious, 
break  of.  83,  86;  vs.  religious  freedom, 
129;   lacking  in  autocracy,  159,  540  f- 

Transformation  of  gentry  into  a  privileged 
class  by  Catherine  IL,  237. 

Transition:  from  ritualism  to  evangelical 
and  spiritual  Christianity,  83  S..  131; 
from  "domestic  economy"  to  "exchange 
economy."  439. 

Trepov:  Sr..  killed  by  Vera  Zasoolich,  191, 

416;   the  younger,  544. 
Tribal  organization  and  house  communion 

in  Russia,  134,  136  f. 
Trinity:   early  popular  beliefs  concerning, 
69  f.;    of    Russian  official   nationalism: 
autocracy,  orthodoxy,  nationality,  182. 
Tsar:   duarchy  of,  and  patriarch  in  seven- 
teenth century,  85;    and  religious  free- 
dom,   123  f.;    adoption   of  title   of,   by 
John  IV..  164;   sacrosanct  character  of, 
168;      "social     contract"     theory     as 
applied  to,  169;    Basilius  Shovysky,  the 
Tsar  boyar,  355. 
Tsar's  guard:  origin  of,  158 


Turkish- Arabian  conquests:  and  their 
effect  on  southern  Russia,  144. 

Tver  Zemstvo:  suggests  constitution  for 
Russia  like  that  sanctioned  by  Tsar  for 
Bulgaria,  304  f.,  563. 

Tvereetinov:  and  his  followers  (1700),  92; 
condemned  by  council  in  1714,  109. 

Two:  essential  features  of  national  type 
131  f.;  official  government  catalogues 
for  public  libraries,  202,  478;  steps  in 
history  of  liberal  pohtical  opinion, 
248  ff. 

Unification:  Jolrn  IIL,  and  national,  32; 
of  public  opinion,  560. 

Uniformity:  national,  and  its  origin,  32. 

United  States  and  Russia:  a  comparison, 
3  ff.;  rapid  growth  of,  4;  colonization 
and  development  of,  5,  438;  similarity 
and  difference  in  character  of  colonists 
of.  6  f.;  and  its  causes.  10;  social  life  of, 
8;  agricultural  character  of,  8;  differ- 
ences in  result  of  settlement  of,  9.  12; 
democratic  social  structure  of,  9:  settlers 
in  Russia  of  inferior  type  to  those  of 
United  States,  12;  monetary  history  of, 
466  ff. 

Universal:  idea  of  Russia  and  Slavs  in 
general,  53;  franchise  and  bicameral 
system,  521  f. 

Universities  and  learned  societies:  under 
Demetrius  Tolstoy's  statute,  319;  and 
present  student  demonstrations,  504  f. 

University  of  Moscow:  founded  by  Em- 
press Elizabeth  (1755),  250. 

University  students:  founders  of  Slavo- 
philism, 52;  political  role  of,  and 
measures  against  them,  218. 

Untenableness  of  Slavophilism  of  first  half 
of  nineteenth  century,  57. 

Uprisings:  of  students  since  1861,  389; 
Polish,  and  "Land  and  Liberty"  organi- 
zation, 390;  agrarian  (1902),  in  govern- 
ments of  Poltava  and  Harkov,  508. 

Urgency  of  political  reform  and  the 
crisis,  433-545.  561. 

Usurers  or  village  creditors:  and  peasants, 
346. 

"Utilitarian  morals"  in  theory  of  niliilism, 
365- 

Valooyev:  report  of,  to  committee  of 
ministers  in  1879  on  new  "bill  of 
coercion,"  187;  founder  of  Northern 
Post,  209;  and  others  in  favor  of  political 
reform  (1881),  314- 

Veeshnegradskee:  financial  policy  of, 
444  f.,  466;  measure  of.  of  July  28,  1893, 
stopping  free  coinage  of  silver,  470. 

Village  and  district:  lectures  particularly 
difficult  and  dangerous,  200;  libraries, 
201,  478;  schools,  211  f.;  creditors,  or 
usurers,  and  peasants,  346. 


ANALYTICAL  INDEX 


589 


Village  commune  (community):  repre- 
sentative of  community  of  Christian 
love,  55.  367;  germ  of  socialistic  society 
according  to  Herzen,  367  ff.  See  also 
Mir. 

Villages:  and  socialist  agitation  twenty 
years  ago  and  now.  360  f.;  permanent 
settlements  in ,  as  a  means  of  propaganda , 
prove  a  failure,  413;  revolutionary 
movement  in,  507. 

Virtues  and  vices:  backbone  missing  in 
Russian,  18. 

\'olkonsky.  Prince:  protests  against  reli- 
gious intolerance  and  persecution,  128. 

Madeemir,  the  Monomach,  and  Constan- 
tine,  the  Monomach,  163. 

WaUace's  Russia,  70,  81,  90. 

"Wanderers":  see  "Runners";  and 
Euphemius,  100. 

Western  and  Eastern  church  in  estimation 
of  Slavophilism,  54. 

Westward  march  of  political  development, 
133  f- 

Witte:  on  Zemstvos,  293,  299  f.,  302,  305  f.; 
on  autocracy  and  liberalism,  332; 
financial  policy  of  (1893  ff.),  444  f.,  446; 
assisted  by  foreign  capital  in  developing 
Russian  manufacture.  459  f,,  472;  elim- 
inates competition  under  his  regime, 
464  f.;  optimistic  \iews  of.  concerning 
protectionism,  465;  protector  of  great 
industries:  introduces  gold  standard, 
466;  advocates  (December  15,  1904) 
"democratic  autocracy,"  533  n.  31, 

Wolkenstein:  reflects  present  general 
demand  for  abolition  of  autocracy,  176  f. 

"Workingmen":  chief  factor  in  political 
struggle  of  the  future,  479  f. 

Workingmen:  in  cities  favorable  to  "pure 
socialism,"  414;  demonstrations  of 
(autumn,  1901,  to  spring,  1902),  506; 
Society  of  St.  Petersburg,  536  f. 

"Wrestlers  with  the  Spirit":  see  Dookho- 
bory. 

Xenomaniacs  and  Xenophilists  in  eight- 
eenth century,  41,  45. 

Vavorsky.  Stephen:  keeper  of  patriarch's 
seat  in  Peter  the  Great's  time,  86. 


Zasoolich.  Vera,  191,  303,  416. 
Zemsky  Nachalnik:  office  of,  245. 

Zemsky  Sobor:  general  representative 
assembly,  17S;  rcrommended  by  Kos- 
helov,  309;  in  scheme  of  Ignatyev.  317 
n.  43;  consultative  a.ssembly  of  Musco- 
\ite  state  not  wanted  by  Dt-mocratic 
Constitutionalists.  519;  summoning  of, 
planned  by  present  government,  543. 

Zemstvo  schools,  289;  and  attitude  of 
government.  212  f.;  and  parish  schools, 
213;  controlled  and  hampered  in  their 
work,  289,  296.  478;  e.xecutive  ofilccrs 
of,  290. 

Zemstvos,  or  provincial  assemblies:  dis- 
proportionate predominance  of  nobility 
in,  241 ;  tendency  of,  on  the  whole  lib- 
eral, 243,  285.  288  f.;  organization  of, 
defective:  a  building  without  foundation 
and  roof,  2S8  ff.;  work  of.  repressed  by 
bureaucracy,  292  f.;  and  constitution- 
alism, 294;  as  \iewed  by  Witte,  293, 
299  f,,  302,  305  f.;  work  of,  a  disap- 
pointment to  Hbcrals.  295;  pwsition  of, 
of  "peaceful  work"  of  improvement  and 
its  results.  296  f.;  change  conditions  of 
life  in  pro\-inces.  297;  coniiict  of.  with 
government,  299;  presided  over  by 
marshals  of  nobility,  300,  310;  under 
control  of  provincial  governors,  300; 
right  of.  of  petitioning  central  govern- 
ment and  the  latter 's  evasive  attitude, 
294,  301  f.;  memorialize  government, 
some  plainly  demanding  a  constitution, 
304  f.,  311,  563;  liberal  propaganda 
among,  according  to  Witte,  305  f., 
occupy  a  humiliating  place  in  "consti- 
tution" of  Loris  Melikov.  314;  stron.!jly 
disapprove  systems  of  Ignatyev  and 
Demetrius  Tolstoy,  317  f.;  appeal  to 
Nicholas  II.  for  more  freedom  (1894), 
325  f.;  Tsar's  answer  to  timid  demands 
of.  326  f.;  aims  of.  defeated  by  Pobcdo- 
nostsev  (1895),  .^27;  have  hut  an  in.sig- 
nificant  peasant  representation  (since 
1890),  344;  and  Plehve,  476  f.;  indorse 
present  liberal  pro.'jram,  528  f.;  meet 
in  a  body  at  St.  Petersburg,  November 
19-21,  1904,  529;  "petition  of  rights" 
of,  530. 

Zoobatovchecna:  meaning  of,  541, 

Zurich  socialist  debates  (1871-73),  40a. 


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